famous letter to his ambassador to the pope:
And that,
And those other old and eloquent lines:
So. The fact is that we were still there and would continue thus for several years more, enlarging Castile with the blades of our swords or as God and the devil had taught us in Oudkerk. The banner of our company was flying from the balcony of a house in the square, and my comrade, Jaime Correas, who was a
One of the men carrying books out and piling them in the street was an elderly Dutchman with long white hair. He was wearing black, as pastors there did, with a dirty collar and gray hose. He did not, however, appear to be a religious man, if one may call those who preach the doctrines of that heretic Calvin religious—may lightning strike the whoreson in hell or wherever he may be stewing. In the end, I took him to be a secretary or city official trying to rescue books from the conflagration. I would have passed right by had I not noticed that the other individual, staggering through the smoke with his arms filled with books, wore the red band of the Spanish soldiers. He was a young man, bareheaded, and his face was covered with sweat and soot, as if he had already made many trips into the depths of the blazing inferno the building had become. A sword swung from his baldric, and he was wearing high boots blackened from charred wood and debris. He seemed to give little importance to the smoking sleeve of his doublet, not even when, finally noticing it as he set his load of books on the ground, he put it out with a couple of distracted swipes. At that moment he looked up and saw me. He had a thin, angular face and a trim chestnut- brown mustache that flowed into a short pear-shaped beard beneath his lower lip. I judged him to be between twenty and twenty-five years old.
“You could give me a hand,” he grunted, when he noticed the faded
He glanced toward the columns of the square, where a few women and children were taking in the scene, and wiped the sweat from his face with the singed sleeve.
“God help me,” he said, “but I am burning with thirst.”
He turned and, accompanied by the fellow in black, ran back to search for more books. After considering the situation for an instant, I raced to the nearest house, where a frightened Dutch family was watching with curiosity in front of a door that had been battered off its hinges.
“Thank you,” he said very simply.
I followed him. I set my knapsacks on the ground and took off my velvet doublet, not because as he thanked me he had smiled nor because I was touched by his singed sleeve and his smoke-reddened eyes, but because suddenly that anonymous soldier had made me realize that at times there are more important things than collecting booty, even if the latter can sometimes be worth a hundred times one’s yearly pay. So I took as deep a breath as I could, and, covering my mouth and nose with a handkerchief I extracted from my pouch, I ducked my head to avoid the sputtering beams that were threatening to collapse and ran blindly into the smoke. I pulled books from the flaming shelves until the heat became asphyxiating and the embers floating in the air burned my throat with every breath. Most of the books were ashes by now, dust that was not “enamored,” as it was in that beautiful and distant sonnet by don Francisco de Quevedo, but only a sad residue, all the hours of study, all the love, all the intelligence, all the lives that could have illuminated other lives now vanished.
We made our last trip before the ceiling of the library collapsed in an explosion of flames that roared at our backs. Outside, we stood gasping for air, stupefied, clammy with sweat, our eyes tearing from the smoke. At our feet were around two hundred books and old documents. A tenth, I calculated, of what had burned inside the library. On his knees beside the pile, drained by his efforts, the Dutchman in black coughed and wept. When he had caught his breath, the soldier smiled at me as he had when I brought the water.
“What is your name, lad?”
I stood a little straighter, swallowing my last cough.
“Inigo Balboa,” I said. “From the
That was not strictly accurate. It was true that the
“Thank you, Inigo Balboa,” he said.