Victus Read online

  If, rather than the bastions, they attack one of the rampart’s central portions, they’ll have an even worse time of it. The poor fools who go down into the moat will never get out. They’ll be fired on from three sides: from the rampart, and from the covering bastions to the left and right.

  Cross fire. Two words that, on paper, are just an engineer’s design concept. But when ink becomes stone, these two words become the light of a very hell.

  Cross fire! Hundreds, thousands, of uniforms descending into and rising out of an everlasting ditch, fired at, bombarded, exterminated by an invisible army. The ditch may have been flooded or, as in most cases, packed with sharpened stakes over five feet in length. Those who impaled themselves would have to be clambered over by the rest until, finally, any advance would become impossible. If the attack were by a small troop, not a man would be left alive; if it comprised thousands, the ditch would fill up with writhing bodies.

  This callous marvel to which Vauban gave his name could be multiplied infinitely. For still more protection, a “moon” or “half-moon” fortification could be set before one of the flat sections. Before they could attack the rampart’s first line, the invader would have to expend thousands of projectiles to demolish the half-moon. And in the unlikely case that it was taken, the defenders would draw back to the next rampart, raising the drawbridges after them.

  And the game would begin again, the fallback still viable. The attackers would have succeeded in taking only an outcrop—at a cost of hundreds of dead. What resources could they call on to resume the attack? Moons, half-moons, ravelins, pincers . . . an endless variety of defensive architecture that does not bear describing to the uninitiated. In any case, anyone who wants to can look up the technical details of a fully equipped armature.

  Undeniably, the fortified architecture of our time has a certain charm. Ours is the art of making the useful beautiful. Geometric lines, clear-cut and clean. Formally ascetic, they conceal nothing. They are what they are: defenses. And all the beings in this trifling universe of ours seek security in a hostile world. In peacetime, civilians may stroll beneath them, happy and safe, secure in the feelings offered by these bastions with their angular defiles, these colossi crouching like immutable sentinels. It is not that the Vaubanian fortification tends toward beauty but, rather, that beauty approaches its forms, yielding to them. Because when we contemplate them, that doubtful principle appears before our eyes, that unfounded faith: that there is order in the world, an order of goodness.

  And in the following print, if this careless windbag puts it in the right place, allow me a poetic detail.

  See the little sentry box at the top of the bastion, which looks like a figurehead? In French, this is called the échauguette. It is a sentry nest, safe from the elements. Beyond the purely functional, military engineers are not unaware of the aesthetic value of their work. And the échauguette is something like the cherry on the cake. The sole detail into which the designer could allow some vain expressiveness. Sometimes it would be delicately conical roofs with black or red slate tiles; at others, ramparts decorated with intricate stone carvings. I was passionate about a great many of them; their artistic value was far from negligible. I knew a Hungarian engineer who drew wonderfully well and whose hobby was sketching these échauguettes. And he was quite good at it.

  What, when the enemy nears, is the first defensive measure to be taken? You blow up the échauguette with gunpowder, to deprive the enemy artillery of a reference point.

  This always caused me a unique, inexpressible, ambivalent kind of pain. A city prepares to defend the homes contained within it, and what’s the first act? The sacrificing of the most exposed point of beauty.

  A city before a siege is like an anthill that has been stepped on. Annibal ad portas! The churchbells ring out in warning. Farmers from the neighboring countryside come to take shelter, with family and livestock in tow. The garrison has soon taken up position. Munitions are distributed, the covers taken off the cannons, gunpowder deposits safeguarded.

  But even in the midst of this uproarious tumult—when the duty officer shouts out for people to stand clear, that the échauguette is about to blow—every time, and I mean every time, the same happens: Everybody stops. Misty-eyed looks in the direction of the échauguette—the silence such that you could hear a match being lit. And then, boom! An instantaneous shift from the state of peace to the state of war. This boom is to a siege as Genesis is to the Bible. We Point Bearers (and, with heavy Miss Waltraud’s assistance, I’ll come directly to the meaning of the Points) had to be a cut above—we couldn’t be like other people. I hated the blowing of the échauguettes, but at the same time experienced the joy, the pleasure of the pain, to come.

  Bazoches’s great error was to believe that the task of the warring Maganons could be dignified—elevated, even, to the saintly status of civilian art. Vauban’s belief was that by making war more technical, lives would be saved. Now, with the time that has passed, a great many massacres later, this altogether puerile notion seems sordid. But the marquis believed in it. Truly he did. I can’t blame him.

  Coming to the end of our stroll, on which he related the history of Byzantium, he asked me a question. We had passed through green secluded meadows, wet with rain, on the outskirts of Bazoches. Crows squawked above our heads. Vauban stopped. “And you,” he said, “in this never-ending war, which side are you on? Are you for cannon or for bastion?”

  “Monsieur, I do not know,” I replied, surprised. After hesitating for a moment, I added: “I suppose I am for whoever’s cause is just.”

  He took hold of my right hand and turned it over as if about to tell my fortune, and then rolled up my sleeve. “Tell the Ducroix brothers they are to give you your first Point.”

  I have summarized a good amount of Vauban’s teachings, but please do not think they were limited to one single walk in the country. In reality, there were many meetings, with him stopping in from time to time when I was in lessons or me being called to his study when he had a free moment or felt like enlarging on something or other. In any case, most of my learning was left to the Ducroix brothers to instill. They composed the text; Vauban applied the finishing touches.

  Let us go back a little. These Points bear explaining. (At least my German mammoth seems to think so; chatterbox cockatoo that she is, she interrupts and demands that I go back to the mention of the first Point.)

  The twins announced my first Point once I had made substantial progress. I stretched out my right arm on a table, palm up, and they applied the tattoo using irons—these seemed part scalpel, part torture instrument. They placed the first Point on my wrist, just where hand and forearm meet. “Point” is one way of putting it. The first was precisely that, a simple circle of indelible ink, dark violet in color, the application of which hurt like anything. The next, an inch higher up my forearm, was more sophisticated, like a plus sign but with the points joined by lines, like a weathervane. The third was a pentagon. Each Point was more elaborate than the last. From the fifth onward, the outline of a bastioned fortress began to take shape. If an engineer reaches perfection, the idea is to have ten Points, covering the whole of the forearm up to the crook of the elbow.

  To get in ahead of the curious reader: No person on earth has ten Points. That is, no person is a Ten Points, to my knowledge. Which is not to say there is no person deserving—merely that the circle of Maganons was so small, so specialized and select, that anyone who might confer the ranking had been dead for decades. Well, I’m still going, a Nine Points. So what? I’m old enough to take on pupils by now. As if that were not enough, the Paris revolutionaries of today, the ones my insufferable Waltraud so admires, are even changing the traditional ways of waging war. On which I would say a few words.

  At the beginning of my century, armies were made up of career soldiers (or mercenaries, whatever you prefer). Given that no such king had endless wealth, armies had relatively few men. This was why bastioned fortresses were so important,
for they blocked invasion routes. If, instead of attacking them, an army chose to go around, putting the fortress at their rear, their lines of communication might be severed, and they would be caught in another kind of cross fire: between the enemy army and the garrison at the fortress, which would come out to attack from behind.

  Nowadays Robespierre and his Paris popinjays have invented the levée en masse—murder en masse, more like. Armies currently stand ten or a hundred times larger than they were in my day. They can leave a number of regiments blockading a fortress, and send the others off ahead; they need not bother taking the fortress. This was why, in my day, there were twenty sieges to every pitched battle, and the majority of the latter were in order to force the lifting of a siege—or to prevent another. Now battles have become little more than tossing rank after rank against rifle and cannon, like feeding firewood into the flames. He with the biggest woodpile wins. The science of modern warfare brought us to this. Viva progress!

  As for the mystery of the Points, in the world of Bazoches, these were a way of recognizing progress.

  At a time when a polite greeting took the form of a light nod of the head, it was the engineers who were the first to go back to the Roman handshake. On clasping hands, they would turn the wrist very slightly, inconspicuously. Each would see the other’s Points and, in this way, work out where the other was positioned in an already decided hierarchy, saving much long-windedness, dispute, and misunderstanding. And believe me when I say how important this was when laying siege to or defending a stronghold. No matter the rankings doled out by the army, a Three Points was always subordinate to a Four Points, and so on. Career officers would perceive something amiss, but in general the Point Bearers were so practical and inscrutable, and military men such dullards, that the latter never cottoned on. Or it did not matter to them.

  The Point Bearers’ hierarchy formed a core universal brotherhood. What a wonder, how galvanizing to the spirit, to stumble upon a complete stranger in Berlin or Paris, in the vast dales of Hungary or up in the Andean peaks scourged by blizzards, and suddenly, all this way from home, feel, with a simple turn of the wrist, as though by some magic, all that distance melt: two men joined by a mutual recognition. No thing in this world can replace that unique glance of complicity.

  Do you know of what I speak, my dear vile Waltraud? No, of course you do not. But it isn’t complicated. Behind you sits my cat, enthralled by the fire. See the way he glances at me? That’s it.

  And yet I did not fully comprehend the value of my tattoos. The Ducroix brothers gave me my second Point for counting chickpeas. Don’t laugh. I was fed up with the Spherical Room. To the back teeth! So much that I had not even realized the progress I’d made.

  You have succeeded in becoming truly alert when, even as you are distracted, you remain alert. Do you take my meaning? Of course not. Nor, at one time, did I. It has to be internalized. At a certain point, you’ll think your mind wanders, but the alertness mechanisms are still on, keeping close track of things.

  For lunch one day, I was given a plate of chickpeas. The Ducroix brothers were eating with me that day, and they noticed the second my mind began to wander. (They were right: I was thinking how the down on Jeanne’s cunt was exactly the same color as these chickpeas.)

  Armand whacked me on the forehead with a ladle. “Cadet Zuviría! How many chickpeas on the plate? Answer immediately!”

  I quickly ate a spoonful before answering: “There were ninety-one. Now, eighty-one.”

  They were delighted. And I hadn’t made it up. I myself was not aware that I knew the answer—until they put the question to me. The mouthful I ate was to vex them, and to demonstrate that I was now being observant continuously, not just from time to time in isolated moments.

  Each time I exited the Spherical Room, the question was always the same: “Cadet Zuviría, what was in the room?”

  As much detail as I went into about the objects I’d seen hanging up, their distances from the floor, the gaps between them, the verdict would almost always be: “Pass, but not perfect.”

  Eventually, one day, at the conclusion of my list, I paused and then added: “And myself as well.”

  They had told me a thousand times that the observer forms a part of what is being observed. To my chagrin, it had taken me months to grasp that I also was one of the things in the room. Maybe this will seem a simple lesson in humility or even a not tremendously witty play on words. However, it was anything but.

  As the enemy prepared to attack my bastion, I had to see everything, enumerate everything. Our rifles, theirs; the condition of our defenses, the number of cannons, the lengths and width of their parallels; and my fear. Nothing in the world distorts reality like a dose of terror. If I was unconscious of my fear, the fear would look instead of me. Or, as the Ducroix brothers would say: “Fear will cloud your sight, then it will be doing the looking instead of your own eyes.” The world is a killer; men die storming or defending ramparts. But in fact, the whole thing is no more than a minuscule white sphere, lost in some corner of the universe, indifferent to our troubles and pains. Herein, le Mystère.

  I became a Three Points upon completing my long trench.

  “Congratulations, Cadet Zuviría. You have earned your third Point,” Armand informed me. “Permit us, however, to qualify the value of the task you’ve completed. Having reached the edge of the field, you continued to dig the trench and place out the fajinas. This was well done, even though it meant the destruction of the bordering hedge. We gave no instructions for you to stop, and an engineer must always be obedient and resolute. Even so, didn’t you notice that the next field had been sowed for corn?”

  “I did.”

  “Correct. Someone digging a trench in private property, outside his own land, would never be punished—on a war footing, all land is in contention. But when the line of your trench met with the donkey pushing the plow, and the goodly man behind it—who, by the way, protested very vehemently at the incursion—did it not occur to you that the exercise was by now exceeding its teaching objectives?”

  “No.”

  “Correct. Orders are there to be obeyed, not questioned. Nonetheless, when this noble worker insulted you, did you really think it was the right thing to hit him with your shovel and throw him in the trench?”

  “I did. The blow merely knocked the man out. To argue with him, I reasoned, would be to waste time. I also did it to keep him safe from the flying bullets. An engineer’s work is to protect the king’s subjects.” I sighed. “I dared do nothing for the donkey; I could, of course, have knocked it over as well with a strong blow to the head, but that would have been to put myself in the line of fire. I also could not have been sure it would fit inside the trench, it being very bulky and the trench narrow. My assessment was that the life of an engineer is worth more than that of a donkey, and so I left it to its fate.”

  Armand and Zeno looked at each other doubtfully. I added: “The donkey appeared indifferent on the matter.”

  The fourth Point was given to me after a session in the hayloft, one of the best moments in my long career—well, making hay while the sun shines, as they say.

  One Sunday afternoon Jeanne and I were in the hayloft after making love, unclothed, and the rain was falling steadily, languidly, without. Jeanne, eyes closed, was dozing. Here was beauty. Her roseate skin, her red locks, reclining on a mattress of straw . . . a vision in the sweet gray half-light of Burgundy. From out of my mound of clothes, I took a folder.

  “I have written you some poems,” I said, and placed before her a sheaf of papers.

  She opened her eyes, and her face lit up. Be a woman noble and high-ranking, or be she stinking peasantry, like my dear vile Waltraud, it is all one; someone says he has written a poem for her, she’s automatically over the moon.

  She took up the sheets of paper. “And this?” she asked in amusement and surprise.

  “A book of poems. Though there is only one that is worth anything, which is the one I co
mpleted yesterday and which won me my fourth Point.”

  “Poems? But these are drawings.”

  “And?” I said, offended. “The Ducroix brother school me in design, not versifying. But they are poems.” I drew closer to her. “They’re fortress designs. Are they to your liking?”

  She didn’t dare make a show of her incomprehension, which was nonetheless plain to see. I laid the sheets out on the straw and went on. “My last blueprint is the best. Can you guess which it is? If you look closely, you’ll see it’s different from the others.”

  Her eyes skipped between them.

  “Give it a proper look!” I said. “You’re Vauban’s daughter. If you can’t understand it, who will?”

  She looked at one of the sheets for a few moments. Then put it aside. Another and another. The rain continued to fall. As she was deciding between the drawings, my mind turned to the rain. It struck me that in wet countries, the rain could be used as a weapon against the besieging army . . .

  “This one,” she said finally. “Yes, this is the one.” She’d gotten it right. Her face resembled that of a child who had just learned to read. “This one is different from the others. They look like identical drawings but are not. It has something extra.” She looked at me. “What makes it different?”

  “In this one,” I said, prodding the sheet of paper, “I created a fortress with the thought of you asleep in the middle of the city. And I defended you.”

  Of the extensive Vauban family, the one who paid the fewest visits to the castle was Jeanne’s husband. It is my understanding that theirs was something of an arranged marriage, and the truth is, I did not find his presence unsettling.

  It wasn’t out of any particular grievance that he kept far from Bazoches. He had simply turned his back on his wife, whom he paid no mind, but not in a hostile or abusive manner. Protocol stated that they had to sit side by side when eating at the great table. He paid considerably more attention to the saltcellar than to his wife (one of his numerous obsessions was a constant fear of running out of salt). When he passed by me, I could almost see the thoughts spilling from his head like sawdust.