When we had finished carrying out the flour, I went and looked for
Augustine; but I could find him nowhere, neither in his father's
house, nor at the headquarters of supplies, nor in the Coso, nor in
Santa Engracia. At nightfall I found him in the powder mill near San
Juan de los Panetes. I have forgotten to say that the Saragossans had
improvised a work shop where were turned out daily nine or ten quintals
of powder. I saw Augustine helping the workmen put into sacks and
barrels the powder made during the day. He was working with feverish
activity.
"Do you see this enormous heap of powder?" he said to me when I
approached him. "Do you see those sacks and those barrels all full of
the same material? Well, Gabriel, it seems to me very little."
"I don't know what you are trying to say."
"I say that if this immense quantity of powder were as big as Saragossa
I should like it still better. Yes, and in such a case I should like
to be the only inhabitant of this great city. What a pleasure! Listen,
Gabriel! If it were so, I would myself set fire to it, and fly into the
clouds, torn to pieces in the horrible explosion like pieces of rock
which a volcano throws to a distance of a hundred leagues. I would be
hurled to the fifth heaven, and of my members, scattered everywhere,
there would be no memory! Death, Gabriel, death is what I desire! But I
desire a death--I do not explain it to you. My desperation is so great
that to die of a gunshot or a sabre-thrust would not satisfy me. I long
to be rent asunder, and diffused through space in a thousand burning
particles. I pant to feel myself in the bosom of a flame-bearing cloud.
My spirit yearns, if only for an infinitesimal instant, the delight of
seeing this wretched body reduced to powder. Gabriel, I am desperate.
Do you see this powder? Imagine within my breast all the flames which
this could make. Did you see her when she went out to get her father?
Did you see her when she threw the money? I was in a corner where I
could see it all. Mariquilla does not know that that man who maltreated
her father is my own! Did you see how the boys threw mud at poor
Candiola? I realize that Candiola is a wretch. But she, what fault has
she? She and I, what fault have we? None, Gabriel. My heart is broken,
and thirsts for a thousand deaths. I cannot live. I will run into the
place of greatest danger and fling myself into the fire of the French.
After what I have seen to-day, I and the earth on which I dwell may not
be together."
I drew him away from the place, taking him to the walls; and we went to
work on the fortifications which were being made in Las Tenerias, the
weakest point in the city since the destruction of San José and Santa
Engracia. I have already said that from the mouth of the Huerva to San
José stretched a line of fifty mouths of fire. Against this formidable
line of attack what avail was our fortified circuit?
The quarter of Las Tenerias extended from the eastern part of the city,
between the Huerva and the old part of the town, perfectly outlined yet
by the wide road which is called the Coso. It was at the beginning of
this century a village of mean houses, almost all inhabited by laborers
and artisans, and the religious houses there had none of the splendor
of the monuments of Saragossa. The general plan of this district is
approximately the segment of a circle whose arc curves out to the open
country, and whose chord unites it to the city, from the Puerta Quemada
to the rise at the Sepulcro.
From that line to the circumference ran several streets, some of them
broken, like the Calles de la Diezma, Barrio Verde, de los Clavos,
and de Pabostre. Some of these were marked not by rows of houses, but
by walls, and lacking sometimes one thing and sometimes another. The
streets spread out into formless little squares or yards or barren
gardens. I describe badly because in the days I refer to the heaps of
ruins left by the first siege had been used to mount batteries and
raise barricades in points where the houses did not offer a natural
defence.
Near the fortification of the Ebro were some remnants of an ancient
wall, with various little towers of masonry which some persons supposed
to be from the hands of the Romans, and others judged to be the work of
the Moors. In my time--I do not know how it may be now--these pieces of
wall seemed to be mortised into the houses, or rather the houses were
mortised into them, appearing like props and corners of that ancient
work, blackened but not crumbled by the passing of so many centuries.
The new had been built in a confused way upon the ruins of the old,
as the Spanish people had developed and grown upon the spoils of other
peoples of mixed bloods, until they became as they are to-day.
The general aspect of the district of Las Tenerias brought to the
imagination pleasant fancies of all that had taken place during Moorish
rule, the abundance of brick, the long gable ends, the irregular
fronts, the window lattices with shutters, the complete architectural
anarchy, making it impossible to know where one house ended and another
began, or of distinguishing whether this had two floors or three, or
if that roof served to support the walls of that one over there. The
streets at best ended in yards with no ways out. The archways, which
gave entrance to a little square, reminded me that here was a vista
upon another Spanish people, very different from those now here.
This amalgamation of houses which I have described to you, this suburb
built up by many generations of laborers and peasants and tanners,
according to the caprice of each, without order or harmony, had
prepared itself for the defence on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth
days of January, at the time when the French began to display their
pomp of attack by placing forces on that side. All the families
living in the houses of this suburb proceeded to build works according
to their own strategic instincts. There were military engineers in
petticoats who demonstrated a profound knowledge of war by walling up
certain spaces and opening others to the light, and for purposes of
firing. The walls of the eastern side were spiked along their length.
The turrets of the wall of Cæsar Augustus, built to resist arrows and
sling stones, now upheld cannon.
If any one of these pieces were turned upon one of the neighboring
roofs, the roof or the entire house, whatever was there, would be
immediately blown to pieces. Many passages had been obstructed, and
two of the religious edifices of the suburb, San Augustine and Las
Monicas, were veritable fortresses. The wall had been rebuilt and
strengthened; the batteries had been joined together, and our engineers
had calculated the positions and the reach of the enemy's guns very
well, in order to accommodate our defences to them.
Our line had two advanced points, the mill of Goicoechea and a house
which, because it belonged to a certain Don Victoriano Gonzalez, has
gone into history by the name of the Casa de Gonzalez. This line,
running from the Puerta Quemada, met first the battery of Palafox, then
the Molino, the mill, in the city, then the garden of San Augustine;
it continued to the mill of Goicoechea, situated a little out of the
district, then to the orchard of Las Monicas, and on to those of San
Augustine; further up, a great battery and the house of Gonzalez.
This is all that I remember of Las Tenerias. There was over there a
place called the Sepulcro, because of its nearness to a church of
that name. More than one portion of the suburb, indeed, deserved the
name of sepulchre. I tell you no more in order not to tire you with
these descriptive minutiæ, unnecessary to one who knows those glorious
places, and insufficient for one who has been unable to visit them.