The Master of the Prado

by Javier Sierra

  “What does all that mean?” I asked Fovel.

  “That the art looks as if it was inspired by heaven itself. We do know, for example, that often, while he was painting, certain . . . things would happen.”

  “What kind of things do you mean?” This was sounding particularly weird.

  “Well, there was a lot of talk about what happened while he was painting his majestic Coronation of the Virgin, which was also called the Immaculate Conception—or Tota Pulchra—for the Jesuit church in Valencia. No matter how you look at it, that is not a normal painting.”

  “Please get to the point, Doctor,” I insisted impatiently.

  “It’s perfectly simple. This enormous painting, almost ten feet high, was commissioned by Father Martin Alberro, a Jesuit from the Basque country who was headed for the seminary of San Pablo in Valencia and who, by the way, was de Juanes’s confessor. The Virgin had appeared to Father Alberrro in an ecstasy—a lady shod with the moon, clothed with the Sun, and crowned with stars, like the Virgin of the Apocalypse of St. John, bathed in splendors—and had personally given him instructions on the kind of portrait he was to paint. Alberro in turn passed these instructions on to Juanes. It was an odd request; according to these instructions, the painting was to have neither perspective nor any kind of geometry but was to incorporate in some very visible position the most important mystical names for the Virgin, like Civitas Dei, Stella Maris, Speculum sine macula, or Porta Coeli.”

  “The Door to Heaven,” I muttered.

  “And in fact, the painting became exactly that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Juan de Juanes, The Immaculate Conception (ca. 1568). Iglesia de la Compañía, Valencia.

  “The story is that as Juanes was about to finish the work, he had an accident that nearly cost him his life. He had climbed up onto some scaffolding to examine the upper part of the painting when it gave way. It was then that the miracle occurred: The Virgin that he had just finished painting extended her arm from the canvas and caught him in the air, setting him gently on the ground.”8

  “That’s a great story,” I admitted.

  “Like all these stories, there’s a grain of truth in it. For Juan de Juanes, his paintings were like living beings who could ease the passage through to the spiritual world. They were doors, in other words. And it was probably because they enabled whoever possessed them to transcend the limits of the material world that his works were so admired and copied.”

  “That’s the same thing they used to say about Fra Angelico’s work,” I noted.

  “Exactly. Separated by a century, both of these men believed that their art served a transcendent purpose. And for both of them, their art was often the result of their visions. So it’s not entirely irrational to think that they might have sought to have their paintings recreate these types of experiences for their viewers. Interesting, no?”

  “It’s more than that!” I exclaimed. “It’s a revelation!”

  For the first time since I’d known him, Fovel actually laughed. “Yes! I couldn’t have put it better myself! Truly a revelation!”

  12

  * * *

  MISTER X

  That afternoon, I left the Prado only an hour before it closed. Somehow I had once again completely lost all sense of time. I’d been in the museum for four hours! In spite of all my precautions, even the fear of encountering the mysterious spy from El Escorial had not been enough to keep me out of the embrace of those galleries.

  The winter night had fallen unsparingly over Madrid, turning the rather formal area around the Villanueva Building, the Plaza de Neptuno, and the Ritz into a dizzy whirl of lighted windows and gaunt, glowing streetlights. It was just after seven o’clock by my watch. I would have to hurry if I still wanted to catch Marina at her Aunt Esther’s to see how she’d fared there after Mister X’s visit.

  The fastest way there—barring a taxi—was across Retiro Park, and required walking the entire breadth of Madrid’s great urban forest before coming out at Avenida Menéndez Pelayo. Crossing the park meant following the meandering paths that snaked through the trees, but it was early and not too cold, and the idea of the walk appealed to me more than the two changes I’d have to make on the Metro to get to the Ibiza station.

  I set off calmly at a good pace, letting myself drift along, my hands stuffed down into the pockets of my parka and my scarf covering my mouth and ears. My head was a whirl of thoughts and feelings, so I took several deep breaths of the cold park air and tried to think where all of this was leading me. I wanted to take advantage of the walk to come to a decision about Marina, and whether or not I should include her in this game anymore, or even continue in it myself. Unfortunately, like a fool, rather than getting down to making practical decisions I avoided them. Instead, I mused over this new way of looking at art that I was learning from the Master, and once again I ignored the human side of my plight.

  But the whole situation did have its funny side. Thanks to a total stranger, I’d started to look at some of the paintings in the Prado almost as if they were artifacts from another planet. I now thought of them as tools built by extremely sensitive minds not at all concerned with achieving mere aesthetic pleasure. I’d begun to convince myself that the larger purpose behind these paintings—where their true meaning lay—had always been to keep open certain portals to the “other world.” It was as if the art was simply keeping alive its original mystical mission dating back to the cave paintings in northern Spain some forty thousand years before. If Fovel was right, this was a secret that only those painters had known, perhaps along with some of their patrons. And now me.

  By that time I was some distance from the museum, standing in the dark on the frozen park grounds, and the idea suddenly seemed little short of ridiculous—Raphael, Titian, and Juan de Juanes opening windows to another world with their paintbrushes! I was astonished that only a few minutes earlier, Fovel had managed to make the whole theory seem convincing, even conclusive.

  And why had the Master decided to reveal everything to this particular journalism student? I wasn’t an expert in art, or even the type who sets up an easel in front of an old master’s paintings and copies it patiently, painstakingly. I wasn’t part of that world, and I wasn’t sure I really belonged to any world.

  “Mr. Sierra?”

  I heard a distant panting from some way behind me that seemed to come from the bottom of the hill leading up to the statues. It sounded as if someone was trying to catch up with me.

  “Mr. Sierra?” the voice repeated.

  My little reverie shattered into a thousand pieces.

  “Excuse me, sir, it is you, isn’t it? Please wait!”

  For some reason the fact that an unknown voice was calling my name from the gloomy depths of Retiro Park was not as surprising to me as the fact that it called me sir.

  “Please, I must speak with you!”

  Before I could decide to run, the man reached me, clouds of breath billowing from his nose and mouth. We were in front of the statue of Doña Urraca. The man seemed to have appeared from nowhere, and I cursed myself for not having taken to my heels, which, frankly, would not have been difficult—he was dragging one leg slightly when he walked, and wouldn’t have caught me.

  “Damn! I knew I’d find you here, Mr. Sierra,” he said, triumphantly, his breathing ragged. And then without waiting for me to reply, he added, “You people always fall!”

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “Your type always falls for it! Like flies in honey!” he exclaimed, giving me an unexpected and rather dismissive clap on the back. “You can’t help it!” he said chuckling in a gloating kind of way. “It’s your curiosity—it gets you every time!”

  He seemed to be amusing himself. Because of the dark, I couldn’t get a good look at his face, but I would have sworn that he was grinning from ear to ear. From what I could tell, he had a coarse look to him, with thinning hair and pale skin. There was something about him that seemed
familiar, as if I’d seen him before, but taking in his Burberry raincoat, impeccable dark suit, and matching tie, I doubted it. He looked like a respectable type, and apart from some professors and some colleagues at the magazine, I didn’t hang out with people who wore ties.

  “Excuse me!” he said, smiling. “How rude of me! I haven’t introduced myself.” He stuck his newspaper under his left arm and extended his right. “My name is Julian de Prada, I’m an inspector.”

  “Police?” I felt uneasy.

  “Something like that. I belong to a unit charged with protecting Spain’s historic art and treasures.”

  I looked at him suspiciously.

  “Really? And what was it that you found so funny? Something about flies?”

  “Let me explain. We’ve been trying for years to capture the man that you’ve been talking to for the past few weeks. He’s quite elusive, and only shows himself occasionally. So, without your knowing it, we’ve been using you as bait to try and catch him.” He gave an awkward chuckle.

  I was shocked at his reference to Fovel.

  “What’s he done?” I asked.

  “It’s more a case of what hasn’t he done. He used to work for the Royal Palace, many years ago, doing work similar to mine. He inventoried and bought works of art for the collection. Since then, though, he’s been freelance, working behind our backs, and collecting a number of works of art. We’re not sure how big his collection is or what he plans to do with it. He’s always refused to tell us anything.

  “Just before Christmas I found out that he’d been in touch with you. First, I saw you together in the museum.” He chuckled again. “You looked as if you were having a good time! Then I got confirmation that you were working together when we saw the application from the library at El Escorial for access to The New Apocalypse. It’s one of the doctor’s weaknesses, you know—he’s always going on about it.”

  “So you say you saw me with him?”

  “Just before Christmas. Don’t bother denying it—you were talking to him in front of The Pearl, remember?”

  Suddenly it came to me why I’d thought de Prada looked familiar to me. He was the reason the Master had suddenly taken off at our first meeting! He must have been among the group of tourists that appeared suddenly in the galley of Italian art and made Fovel so nervous. But why?

  “So it was you who was at the El Escorial library looking at the Amadeo book the week before we went, right?”

  De Prada smiled his assent in a flash of white teeth.

  “And it was you who went to see Marina yesterday to tell me to stay away from Fovel!”

  He nodded.

  “I didn’t have your address,” he replied, “only hers. I had checked the visitors’ book at El Escorial and seen it there. I knew your movements in the museum, knew that Fovel’s path crossed yours a number of times, but I didn’t otherwise know where the hell to find you. Luckily—as I suspected—it was pretty easy to get you to come here.” He sounded very pleased with himself.

  “Easy?” I didn’t like that.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, pleased as could be. “One of the doctor’s weak points is that he always attracts the same type of accomplice. Young. Curious. Malleable.” He savored this last word. “After a couple of meetings, he always brings them to The Glory. It never fails!” He clapped his hands together against the cold as more steam escaped from his nose. “What it boils down to is that the old man is fascinated by any painting remotely connected to both death and the Austrias,” De Prada said, using a term often employed in referring to the Habsburg kings of Spain. “So, once I understood his pattern, all I needed to do was get you interested in that Titian painting so that you’d end up going to look at it on one of your visits, and then wait for the doctor to appear, and—bang!”

  “Bang?” I stared at him.

  He laughed quietly. “You don’t realize it, but I had everything ready today to grab him. It’s a shame he didn’t show.”

  I stood there, stunned.

  Then de Prada and I left the statues and made our way toward the edge of the pond, under the bare winter skeletons of the chestnut and walnut trees. At that hour, all the pleasure boats were moored and the only other people on the path that circled the pond were one couple and three people in sweats, jogging.

  I turned back to face de Prada, expecting him to continue, to say something that would explain why we had not seen each other in front of The Glory.

  “It was clever of you to leave the pages about Charles V’s mummy with Marina.” I said quietly.

  “Bah!” he said with a self-satisfied smile. “I could have used anything from that period. Those crazy Austrias believed that paintings were alive!”

  “You sound as if that bothers you,” I remarked.

  “Look . . . frankly, it does. I mean, think about it! Charles V dies contemplating The Glory, then his son and successor, the great Philip II, creator of El Escorial, dies in his bedchamber surrounded by paintings that he believed were able to sense his pain, as if they were living beings, supernatural beings!”1

  “You’re not the first person to tell me something like that,” I told him, remembering the old monk Juan Luis at El Escorial.

  “See? Sadly, that kind of madness was pretty widespread back then. It took hold of the people, too—many more of them caught the fever than you’d ever think!”

  “Why do you call it a fever?”

  “Ideas can be like a virus, Mr. Sierra. That’s why I’m here—to prevent another epidemic. Were you aware that soon after Philip II died, both clerics and laypeople all across Spain claimed to have seen the king’s soul leave purgatory and enter the kingdom of heaven?”

  “Well—” I began.

  “Well, they did!” de Prada interrupted me. “Some, like the Carmelite monk Pedro de la Madre de Dios claimed that something similar happened eight days after the king died. Years later there were others, like my namesake, Brother Julian de Alcalá, who claimed that they witnessed two very strange-looking, colored clouds fusing together near Paracuellos del Jarama exactly at the moment that the king ascended to heaven.”

  “Wow—like UFOs,” I remarked drily.

  “Don’t be clever, young man! Brother Julian’s vision was enormously famous. It appears in several texts of the time and was thoroughly documented. It happened at the end of September 1603, and there was so much talk about it that Murillo ended up doing a canvas of it for the Convent of San Francisco in Seville. You wouldn’t believe how much it borrows from The Glory! There is a column of fire on the ground representing purgatory, and in an opening above, in the sky, the Virgin sits awaiting the monarch. Not only did our kings have these extravagant beliefs that went well beyond their Catholic faith, they also created a whole supernatural artistic style which, believe me, is not a good thing for modern man.”

  De Prada paused in his harangue to fish out a cigarette from the pocket of his trench coat and light up the middle of Retiro Park. Then I made an attempt to bring our little encounter to a close. Something about his line of argument had struck me as strange. For an inspector in an official role, he seemed to be taking this a little far. Was that really what he was? How could I check? Either way, his mood swings—bitter one minute and grandiose the next—were beginning to make me nervous.

  I had to set the stage for my exit, without his getting suspicious. “So, you have a pretty good idea of what Fovel likes, right?”

  “Good enough. He’s a charlatan from another era. And you’re not that different. He’s obsessed with this stuff.”

  I pretended not to hear the insult, but he pressed it.

  “Don’t take offense now,” he said, smiling again. “But the twentieth century’s almost over, you know? We’ve put a man on the moon. We have cable TV now. The Concorde can get us from Paris to New York in less than four hours! What sense is there in going back to things like mystics, or miracles, or the dead reappearing? Who needs a saint who can be in two places at once when physics is on the verge of
discovering how to transport particles from one part of the universe to another? Why should you swallow tales of witches flying around on broomsticks when we have drugs that can give you that same sensation?”

  Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Fray Julián of Alcalá’s Vision of the Ascension of the Soul of King Philip II of Spain (ca. 1645–1648). The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

  “Ahh!” Suddenly I thought I understood what was behind our discussion. “You’re saying all this because of my magazine, aren’t you? That’s why you’re trying to convince me. You think I’ll publish what Fovel has been telling me and it bothers you.”

  Immediately, de Prada became very serious.

  “Look, son, you’re still a young man with promise. You still have a chance to give up this foolishness before it’s too late. Focus on your career. Get your degree. And keep your nose out of things that don’t concern you, or—”

  “Or what?” I pressed him, lifting my gaze from the pond and looking right at him.

  “Or you’ll ruin your future. Listen carefully. The things the doctor is telling you he’s told before to lots of other guys like you, and believe me when I tell you that every one of them eventually went crazy.”

  De Prada’s words didn’t sound so much like a threat, more like a weird but sincere obsession.

  “What I still don’t get is why you’re so concerned about the kinds of things Doctor Fovel could be telling me. They’re very esoteric; they wouldn’t interest most people.”

  “Oh—don’t get me wrong.” He took a deep drag on his cigarette. “I don’t care about what Fovel is saying to you. I care about what you’ll repeat. Sooner or later, just like you said, you’ll write something about the things he’s told you. You’ll do it because you think it’s interesting, or original, not realizing that if you do that you’ll be messing with a system that has been working just fine for hundreds of years! That’s what I’m trying to avoid. I’m concerned that the seed of Fovel’s ideas will take hold in this real world that has taken so much for us to build. We haven’t managed to achieve two hundred years of reason and all the triumphs of science so that you and people like you can come along and get other people interested once again in the invisible and the ineffable. In things that can’t be weighed or measured! Can you imagine a Prado filled with people who want to use those paintings to enter some sort of a trance? Do you really want to transform the temple of Spanish culture into a mecca for half the nutcases on the planet? Come on! Grow up, for God’s sake!”