He harried me with questions. “Too close,” he said at one point. “You’ve got the first parallel starting far too close to the city. The day the work starts, the troops will be at risk of being fired on and destroyed.”
“Do you want Berwick to back this? Then give him want he wants. The closer we start, the less time we’ll need to reach the walls. Berwick won’t be able to resist.”
“The three parallels, and the channels between them, they’re so wide,” he objected. “Why? Digging out that much earth means more effort than is needed, and that way you lose time.”
“The width of the trench walls needs to be proportional to that of the defenders’ walls,” I argued. “For the attack itself, we’ll need considerable numbers. Where are you hoping the shock troops will go? And how do you expect soldiers and sappers to circulate in such thin channels? The traffic of men and matériel will all be bumping into each other. In trying to save time, you’ll waste it.”
“You’ve also aimed the trench much farther to the left,” he said, “closer to the sea.”
“The land in that area, if you remember, abounds with dykes and small streams. They’ll be dry in the summer. The men digging will be able to use the riverbeds that run parallel to the walls. They’ll only have to work the trench a little deeper than the ones naturally there from the watercourses.”
I’d done a good job in one sense: An enemy is harder to kill at close quarters. That twenty-four hours sharing such a small space, and the sham solidarity—but solidarity after all—had given me a glimpse of the man. He had a habit of scratching his fleshy cheeks with his ring finger, when it’s so much more usual for people to use their forefinger. Verboom ceased to be my mortal enemy and turned into a middle-aged man with a distinguishing characteristic: He scratched his face with his ring finger. Our shared enterprise generated something akin to camaraderie. You don’t wish your fellow oarsman dead—at least not until you’ve reached the shore.
Is it possible to honor one’s enemy? I began to question everything. What if, after all, the evil was not in him but in me? There was no way for me to contradict his account of our hostilities. In reality, what ill had Verboom done me? He had been showing off in front of a lady one day when a muddy “gardener” had launched into him. Anyone in his place would have cursed me, as he had. As we went on with our calculations of barrow loads, and as I kept going with my diversions and approximations, drainage depths, cavalry numbers, angles of counter-escarpments, I worked out that my dislike for Verboom was but a manifestation of my love for Jeanne Vauban. Perhaps I hated him only because that was easier than owning up to the truth: I’d lost Jeanne, and I was solely responsible. This new perspective unsettled me.
Understand my situation. Torn from my home, confined but still using my intellect to fight, in secret and against everyone, including my own side, who by now might consider me a deserter. Jimmy about to arrive, a presence to oppose that of Don Antonio. And The Word, drifting around somewhere in that corrupt, dust-filled atmosphere. The disquiet I underwent in those days made my hate for Verboom falter.
No, it isn’t that, no. I said I’d be sincere, and I will.
I’ll tell you why we hated each other from the moment we set eyes on each other, and why I hated him until I killed him, and why, to this very day, I hate Joris Prosperus van Verboom.
Because! Some things simply are, one doesn’t choose them, full stop. And to hell with Verboom!
End of chapter, damn it all.
Or not? Oh, my blond walrus suggests that it might be good to tie it up. Ah, yes, she says I should recount the rest of what happened that evening. Now you see what’s going on? You’ve become this book’s engineer, and I’ve been reduced to a poor sapper.
Once we’d finished the job, we were both utterly mentally exhausted. Verboom sent for drink. Port was his passion, and it was what relieved him. A bottle of that strong wine, he said, cost fortunes. Since the war had begun, Portugal had traded only with England, meaning his reserves had steadily diminished. And in spite of that, he shared it with me. Perhaps, as I say, after our shared endeavor, it was harder for him to show me bad manners that evening than he’d find it to have me killed the next morning.
As with all men when they drink (apart from Jimmy), our talk turned to women. Well, Verboom’s talk; I said nothing about how much I missed Amelis. During the time Verboom had been confined in Barcelona, the Red Pelts even let him receive visits from high-class courtesans.
“Well, just the one,” he said, as though it were nothing. “A harlot in pay of their magistrates.”
“Ha!” I said. “Just one woman to keep you company! Such an eminent hostage, and subjected to the torment of monotony? Doubtless they wanted to make it like being married for you.”
We were drunk enough by this point for him not to pick up on my sarcasm.
“Oh, but she knew all the tricks, that one. The first thing I plan to do when we enter the city is to have her found. A dark-haired beauty, a bit too thin. I like them with a bit more flesh on. My, could she wiggle those hips, though, and her tongue was a miracle worker.”
“Dark hair?”
“Yes, very dark, her hair, but not her skin,” he clarified, rapping the table with his knuckles. “And a body harder than oak. Although, the little slut, she was also stingy as can be.” He laughed. “She always came wearing the same dress, a violet one. No jewelry, never any new attire whatsoever. Oh, but do you want to know what the most unusual thing about her was?” As he spoke, he glanced around in the manner of a man reminiscing. The port had gone to his head, and he hadn’t noticed me looking at him like an animal. “For a woman, she had quite a brain on her. When I was at my lowest points, it was her, her!, who came up with the way out of my hardships. ‘Joris, darling,’ she said, ‘if you want to get out of here, propose an exchange. Suggest they swap you for another big fish, someone at your level. Like that general, say, Villarroel, the one the Bourbons have captured. The only reason it hasn’t happened is because no one’s had the idea. Him to Barcelona, you to Madrid. Everyone happy.’ ” Verboom shook his big head in admiration, like a dog shaking water from its fur. “I just hadn’t imagined it would be so easy. I made exactly that suggestion. And here I am.”
How can I possibly begin to describe the pain? It was more than I could bear. The way he’d recounted the intimacy of her “Joris, darling . . . ” We were drinking from clay cups. I didn’t realize I was crushing mine in my hand. Suddenly, it shattered into pieces, making a noise like a cracked nut.
This brought Verboom out of his drunken stupor. Looking at me, he saw it in my face. At which his lit up. “No,” he said, “it can’t be.”
I’m ninety-eight years old. And I could live to a thousand and ninety-eight, and still the way he laughed in that moment would resound in my ears as though it were yesterday.
7
Have any of you ever been dead? I have, several times. And such a benign state it is, such a pleasure to be in, that I can well understand why no one comes back from there. Death only kills desires and obligations. And without desires or obligations, why come back to the trifling circumference of this universe of ours?
To recap: Good old Zuvi behind the Bourbon cordon, locked in a room empty except for the dust, my design for the Attack Trench complete. Cannon fire resounding without, monotone and impersonal, as though it were le Mystère itself being racked with laughter. Since I had completed my task, the following dawn was surely to be my last. Verboom consulted me on a last few details, shamelessly scribbling down all my answers. Rubbing his tired eyes, he stowed the notes in a file and then let out a little cry in Dutch.
In came two heavies broader across their backs than I am long of leg. The Antwerp butcher stuffed the sheets of paper into the folder. And as he did so, he coolly leaned his head closer to me.
This small gesture said it all. They were going to kill me there and then. Doubtless they were mercenaries, private thugs hired by Verboom. Four massive hands lifted
me up under my arms.
“Wait a moment!” I screeched.
Never has my mind whirred into action so quickly. I elbowed my way out of their grips and forced myself back into my seat. Then, extending a hand across the map, I said in a miserable, pleading tone: “Monseigneur! Et les moulins?”
“What mills?”
“We still haven’t finished planning the attack on Section L here. The rebels will turn these mills into redoubts.”
Verboom blinked. “Ah, yes,” he said, “the mills in Section L. We were going to come back to them and forgot. Well, they aren’t especially important. The attack won’t go very near them.”
Though what I heard him saying was: “No, we won’t defer your execution.” The two mercenaries stood there like hunting dogs straining at their chains. They lifted me out of my seat again. Then I came up with a tall story about the mills: An anonymous genius had come up with a curious system for concealing artillery, I said. The windows in the mills were going to be made into gunwales, and medium-caliber cannons placed inside—inconspicuously, the barrels not sticking out. They weren’t windmills, but the idea was to put sails on them like a windmill, and these, turning in the wind in time with the cannon fire, would serve to disperse the gunpowder smoke. The enemy would take a good long while working out where the deadly shots were coming from.
“How original!” exclaimed Verboom, obviously planning to use the idea himself one day. He made a few notes and, thinking out loud, asked: “Do you know the mad genius who had the idea? Perhaps, when we take the city, I’ll have him spared and offer him the chance to serve under me.” Verboom wasn’t the most intelligent of men. But then, swiveling his big head all of a sudden, he looked on me with renewed spite. His own words had led him to the answer. “It was you, of course,” he said.
That was the last straw. Well, you can’t survive forever, hopping from frying pan to frying pan. Verboom gave the order for me to be taken out, and this time the two giants got a good hold of me.
I had no way of knowing, but my fate had been decided several days earlier. A number of spies who had been caught in Barcelona had been hanged outside the walls as an example. The Bourbons decided to carry out reprisals by hanging prisoners along the cordon. Verboom had my name included in the list. In fact, when I arrived, there was only one noose left, on a fifteen-foot L-shaped stage just behind the edge of the cordon.
There was an uproariousness to this mass execution that didn’t seem much suited to the meting out of justice. The sight of the hanged men on the city walls had stirred the troops, and the officers were having trouble containing them. I was jostled and shoved through a sea of arms; if not for my thug escorts, I wouldn’t have made it as far as the scaffold. My hands were tied behind my back, the noose was dropped down over my head, and the rope was attached to a wooden contraption designed for hoisting infantry out of the trench.
I could see everything from up there. Everything. A westerly wind was blowing the smoke out to sea. My eyes, free from the dust haze of the previous days, scanned the front.
The cordon, the Bourbon cannons. On that day, their gunners seemed subdued in their work, as though Pópuli’s imminent departure had somehow lulled them. Men scurried antlike along the channels that ran from the cordon to the Capuchin convent, arms full of munitions. From the city, Costa’s missiles came in a measure rather than a torrential fashion.
The Two Crowns’ positions were visible, too, and ours I knew from memory. I was certain that the men of the Coronela were behind every rampart face and manning every bastion. In each of the bell towers nearest to the ramparts, pairs of observers. Repair brigades would be emptying detritus from the moat, shielded by welded-together doors.
The land between the two sides, apparently unpeopled, seethed with secret armies. All the ruined houses, fought over a thousand times, had patrols from both armies hiding inside. I could sense our snipers nestled in rifts and crevices. Thus, at once I saw the hunter and the prey, the reckless foragers and the snipers stalking them. Beyond the palisade, the battered city walls, and beyond them the outline of the city, with dozens of bell towers pointing upward like needles. And beneath it all, our Mediterranean, ever indifferent to the agonies of men. The city put me in mind of a moribund body, which, though going into its death pangs, continually formed new patches of scar tissue.
There is something irremissable about the contact of a noose against one’s neck. My final thoughts, little as I like to admit it, were empty, emotionless technicalities. Costa needs to alter his range, I thought. A number of soldiers heaved on the wooden contraption. I felt my feet lift off the platform.
The beauty of this world is hidden from us until the moment we feel disconnected from it. In my final vision of things, all was well, beauteous, in order. There was even orderliness to the destruction of the ramparts, the breaches perfect, like silk cocoons. Infinity resides in every instant, every instant is in itself abundant. How wrong ever to think otherwise! My final thought was: How lovely a siege is. Then, as I was deprived of air, delirium overcame me.
I heard a noise. This: “Wake up. That’s an order.”
I opened my eyes.
It was Jimmy. He peered at me from very close up. I could even smell the perfume on his wig.
There before me, the Jimmy I knew: he and his conceited self-satisfaction, his little courtier laugh, proud as a peacock. He had a small retinue. Seeing me wake, he turned to them in triumph, twirling his hand affectedly, as if to say: See? I did it. He’s back to life.
Forgive the digression. I was in a hospital tent for Bourbon officers. Thick bandages swaddled my neck. Most of the beds were empty, but we weren’t alone. At the far end, on a rickety field bed, there was a Spanish captain going through death pangs, his wounds too atrocious to be hidden with bandages. He exhaled a musical-sounding death rattle. Jimmy paid him not the slightest attention. He ordered his retinue to leave.
“You’re a lucky bird,” he said when it was just the two of us and the dying man. “I show up, come to inspect the position, and there I see you, dangling from the scaffold with your cock erect. Another second and even I wouldn’t have been able to save you. Can you speak?”
I shook my head.
“Little wonder. Much longer and the noose would have pulled your head clean off your body. Was it Verboom’s doing?”
I nodded. Removing his gloves and placing them on the table next to us, Jimmy shook his head in mock astonishment. “Well, well. You two been getting on that well?”
I responded with a bras d’honneur, though a not very energetic one, given my state. Jimmy’s face clouded over in thought. He sat down beside me on the bed. A few breaths. Then he patted the inside of my calf. “I’ve got a lot of work to do. While you recover, I’ll decide whether I ought to enlist you or put you back up on that scaffold. Now sleep.”
On my third day of confinement in the field hospital, they came to get me. Jimmy had installed himself in a place called Mas Guinardó, a large country house situated within the Bourbon cordon. Some English mercenaries, doubtless Jimmy’s own domestic staff, took me there, and they tossed me into the house like a fish into a barrel.
Jimmy wasn’t there; my only company, a couple of servants. A strange, ambiguous state to be in: guest and prisoner. I had no orders, nor could I give any, so I simply roamed the premises. The study was overflowing with a clutter of documents and papers. And, on the table in there, a missive from Little Philip.
Let a cat loose in your house, and it’s going to have a sniff around. Jimmy knew that, so I felt sure he’d left the letter knowing I’d read it. It contained the directives for the final attack.
Sure, as I am, of Barcelona’s imminent surrender, I have adjudged it convenient to communicate to you my intentions with regards the matter. As it stands, there can be no doubt, the rebels wage war upon us. Any grace afforded them will be out of the piousness and compassion of my heart, and thus, should they, repenting of their errors, beg for our mercy before the tre
nch is embarked upon, you will not cede it them immediately, but then listen to what they have to say. You will make them aware of the seriousness of their rebellion and how undeserving they are of our mercy. You will make them believe they have hope, by offering to intercede with me on their behalf, and by saying that you will ask for their lives to be spared, though that is the only grace you will ask, and only for the high command. If they fail to understand this and allow the trench to be begun, in that case you will not listen to any offer of capitulation except one of outright surrender. If they continue to resist, and it should come to the final assault, in that case they will no longer be deserving, as I’m sure you see, of the slightest compassion, and must accept the final severities of war. Whichever Spanish officers make it into the city shall then be their masters.
Mother of God. If this was the fate they had planned for the officers, what would they do with the rest of the inhabitants?
Jimmy came in unannounced, so utterly aloof that he didn’t even deign to reprimand me for snooping.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll keep this brief. I’m busy.”
Always the same impatient movements, even when he was relaxing. He grabbed an apple from a tray, took a seat in a padded armchair, and began chewing the apple. In private, he had the manners of a child, one leg dangling over the arm of the chair, tipping his head back as he ate.
“You’re being paid a pittance by the rebels,” he went on. “So you aren’t fighting on their side for the money. Nor out of ambition, given how obvious it is that the battle’s lost. Tell me: Is there someone inside the city you’re being loyal to?”
“Yes,” I said. My voice sounded like something being scraped against chalk. But at least it had come back.
“Man or woman?” he asked.