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The Sun Over Breda

Stupefied, I resisted the pressure of his hand on my shoulder as I watched Copons place his dagger to the neck of the Dutch soldier and slit his throat from ear to ear. Shaking, I raised my eyes toward Alatriste’s dark face. I could not see his eyes, though I knew they were on me.

“H-h-he was…” I stammered.

Then I stopped, for words suddenly seemed pointless. With an involuntary gesture of rejection, I shook the captain’s hand from my shoulder, but he kept it there, holding on like an iron clamp. Copons stood up and, after cleaning the blade of his dagger on the victim’s clothing, replaced it in its sheath. Then he went out into the corridor before I could even blink.

I turned brusquely, feeling my shoulder at last free. I took two steps toward the young man who was now dead. Nothing about the scene had changed, except that his lament had ceased and a dark, thick, shining veil had descended from the gorget of his armor, the red blending with the splendor of the firelight at the window. He seemed more alone than before, a solitude so pitiable that I felt an intense, deep pain, as if it were I, or part of me, who was sitting on that floor, back against the wall, eyes fixed and open, staring at the night. I know, I thought, that someone somewhere is waiting for the return of this man who won’t be going anywhere. Perhaps a mother, a sweetheart, a sister, or a father is praying for him, for his health, for his life, for his return. And there may be a bed where he slept as a boy and a landscape he watched grow and change. And no one there knows he is dead.

I do not know how long I stood there, silently staring at the corpse, but after a while I heard a stirring, and without having to turn I knew that Captain Alatriste had stayed there all the time by my side. I smelled the familiar harsh scent of sweat, leather, and the metal of his clothing and weapons, and then I heard his voice.

“A man knows when the end has come. That man knew.”

I did not answer. I was still contemplating the corpse’s slit throat. Now his blood was forming an enormous dark stain around his legs, which were stretched out in front of him. It is incredible, I thought, the amount of blood we have in our bodies, at least two or three azumbres

, and how easy it is to spill it.

“That is all we could do for him,” Alatriste added.

Again I had no answer and stood a while longer without speaking. Finally I heard him move again. Alatriste came close a moment, as if wondering whether or not to speak to me, as if there were countless unspoken words between us that would never be said if he did not say them now. But he said nothing, and finally his footsteps headed toward the corridor.

It was then that I turned around. I felt a mute, tranquil rage that I had never known until that night. A desperate anger, as bitter as Alatriste’s own silences.

“Do you mean to say, Your Mercy, Captain, that we have just performed a good work? A good service?”

I had never spoken to him in that tone before. The footsteps stopped, and Alatriste’s voice sounded strangely opaque. I imagined his gray-green eyes in the penumbra, staring vacantly into the void.

“When the moment comes,” he said, “pray to God that someone will do the same for you.”

That is what happened that night when Sebastián Copons slit the throat of the wounded Hollander and I shrugged away Captain Alatriste’s hand. That was how, scarcely without realizing, I crossed that shadowy line that every lucid man crosses sooner or later. There, alone, standing before that corpse, I began to look at the world in a very different way. I knew myself in possession of a terrible truth that until that instant I had intuited only in Captain Alatriste’s glaucous gaze: He who kills from afar knows nothing at all about the act of killing. He who kills from afar derives no lesson from life or from death; he neither risks nor stains his hands with blood, nor hears the breathing of his adversary, nor reads the fear, courage, or indifference in his eyes. He who kills from afar tests neither his arm, his heart, nor his conscience, nor does he create ghosts that will later haunt him every single night for the rest of his life. He who kills from afar is a knave who commends to others the dirty and terrible task that is his own. He who kills from afar is worse than other men, because he does not know anger, loathing, and vengeance, the terrible passion of flesh and of blood as they meet steel, but he is equally innocent of pity and remorse. For that reason, he who kills from afar does not know what he has lost.