The Master of the Prado

by Javier Sierra

  I sighed. “That’s really not likely to happen, though, is it?”

  He was having none of it. “Don’t you believe it! You weren’t around in the seventies, were you? There was a whole movement then inspired by the book The Morning of the Magicians, which later became the New Age movement, and grew through articles in magazines, essays, and programs on TV and radio, and actually managed to seduce a lot of the European intelligentsia. These people wrote about conspiracies, parallel universes, synchronicity, miracles, lost libraries, and remote, forgotten technologies, and tried to rewrite history using these ideas. They reinterpreted the Second World War through an occultist lens, claiming that Hitler and Churchill were engaged in much more than just a military conflict, that this was in fact a mythical battle, involving magicians, astrologers, and mystics of all kinds, just like in the Middle Ages, and that the entire spiritual future of the West was at stake. Imagine! They even claimed that all of these ‘disciplines’ were the echoes of a prehistoric science that we lost in some great cataclysm and have since misinterpreted. They believed that alchemy contains some deep knowledge of atoms, and that astrology incorporates knowledge of the structure of the universe! They chased one crazy idea after another. And you know what? Those ideas actually took hold in the culture, so much so that, without even knowing it, you’re just another product of that lunatic way of thinking, which, thank God, was mostly beaten. Until now.”

  The turn that the conversation had taken had made me even more suspicious.

  “What did you say your job was?” I asked him.

  “Inspector of patrimony,” he replied.

  “You seem more like a priest,” I said.

  He chuckled quietly to himself. “I get it; you’re still young, and of course it suits you to attack anything remotely connected to institutions or authority. You don’t have to believe a word of what I’ve just told you, but you should. Don’t be drawn by the dark side, son. Stay away from Fovel . . . or you’ll be sorry.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “Take it however you want.”

  “Then I’ll just take it as your second slipup of the day.”

  An acid smile unrolled slowly across his face. “What are you talking about?”

  “Well,” I hesitated, “I wasn’t going to say anything, but Fovel, who you say you’ve been pursuing so diligently, was talking to me this afternoon at the museum. The fact that you missed that says a lot about your abilities.”

  The tiniest glimmer of bewilderment appeared in his eyes.

  “Uh . . . where was this? Where were you?”

  “Right in front of The Glory, as you thought.”

  “That’s impossible!”

  “And you know something else?”

  De Prada didn’t blink.

  “Here’s my reply to you and your threat: I’m going to keep on meeting with him, whatever you think it’s going to do to your world system. You can’t arrest me for that, can you?”

  “No, I can’t,” he replied, his face taking on a sour expression. “But be very careful that you don’t become his accomplice, or our next meeting won’t be so friendly. That’s all I’m going to say.”

  13

  * * *

  THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS

  It took two whole days to rid my mouth of the bitter taste left by my encounter with Julian de Prada. It wasn’t until then that I realized what had caused him to approach me: fear. Fear that some dumb, ignorant kid like me would come along and mess up some order of things I hadn’t even begun to fathom. In other words, fear that I would use my new journalistic tools—which I had been sharpening through my studies—to reveal something uncomfortable for him.

  But fear also spreads easily and is corrosive, eating away at everything it touches, which is what happened to me. Suddenly, I was no longer concerned with myself or my predicament, but was seized by an increasing anxiety about Marina. My encounter with Mister X made me realize that I needed to make a decision and soon. Since I’d involved her in this whole adventure I had spent more time with her than ever before. We were accomplices now, and much better friends, and I sensed that this friendship was on the edge of becoming something more. I felt as if I could almost say that I loved her, and because of this, her safety was becoming an obsession for me. I recalled how Marina had asked me to drop all of this, and suddenly I couldn’t get the terror in her voice out of my head.

  I wondered what I should do. How could I tell her that her scary visitor had accosted me coming out of the Prado and threatened me as well? Would she agree to let me continue my investigations on my own for a while, keeping her out of it? Wouldn’t that dampen our relationship? Damn! If on the one hand I took de Prada’s threats seriously and followed his advice, I’d lose Fovel, though I might end up getting to keep Marina. On the other hand, given my pattern, I’d probably keep going. But I’d risk the terrible price of having my heart broken.

  Luckily, nothing much out of the ordinary happened during the next forty-eight hours, or at least that’s how it seemed to me. I visited Marina twice at her Aunt Esther’s house, and finally managed to convince her and her sister that they had nothing to fear. Needless to say, I didn’t tell them that I’d actually met Mister X nor that his attention was now firmly focused on me.

  I also took advantage of the time to catch up with both my studies and the magazine, as well as to prepare for my next visit to the museum. The calm of those days helped me to reach a decision. In spite of de Prada’s threats and Marina’s fear, I would keep meeting the Master and try to get to the bottom of things, though I knew I’d be constantly on the lookout for Mister X’s shadow. Luckily, I didn’t see it, and this absence of his seemed to awaken a strength in me that I didn’t realize I had. For the first time I began to realize that I could be the one to have the final word in this story, including what lessons to receive and what paintings to consider.

  I resolved, too, that from then on I would record everything that happened, and each revelation. What I was unwilling to see was that de Prada had in effect set my course a second time. Thanks to what he’d told me in Retiro Park, I now wanted to find out everything I could about Philip II. Now it was a need. I had a hunch that this figure—or some of the six hundred or so portraits of him—held the key to just what kind of war I had enlisted in.

  And there in the half-light of my desk, in Room C33 of Chaminade Residence Hall, I began to work toward my new goal.

  It was not difficult to find a number of accounts of Philip’s death, which took place on September 13, 1598, in the royal bedchamber in the Monastery of San Lorenzo at El Escorial. They were all based on the description written by Brother José de Sigüenza, whom I knew from a similar description of his on the last hours of Charles V. Sigüenza was a key figure of his time, keeper of the royal reliquary where the monarchy stored the relics of its saints. He was in effect the first of El Escorial’s house historians.

  As a result, all of the accounts said much the same thing. At the age of seventy-one, in the waning days of June 1598, with an eye to his failing health—his abdomen and extremities were swollen and he was plagued with pain, gout, and an insatiable thirst—Philip decided to take his leave of the Royal Palace in Madrid and install himself within the enormous palace complex he had built to serve as his tomb. Philip’s journey from the palace in Madrid to El Escorial would have been horrific. It took the king and his retinue six whole days to travel a mere thirty-five miles. They journeyed beneath a blazing sun, stopping strategically along the way in houses belonging to the crown, with the most powerful man in the world constantly at the edge of consciousness. The uric acid in his system had reached such levels that it took over not only his feet but also his arms and hands. His entire body felt like raw flesh. The merest brush of his clothing was an agony, he could not walk, and it cost him everything he had simply to remain seated in his coach. The nauseating odors that rose from his many suppurating open sores were harbingers of grim things to come.

 
As soon as he reached El Escorial, Philip locked himself away in the modest room in the southernmost part of the monastery that he himself had designed. Were it not for the four-poster bed that filled it almost completely, the tiny space would have seemed like a cell to almost anyone else. But not to the king. The room lay in a privileged part of the monastery, directly above the royal mausoleum where he was to be interred, and through a small window opening he had installed on his left, he could see the high altar and follow the Mass without getting up from his bed. A set of double doors opened onto a bright and spacious corridor, adorned by a rustic frieze of Talavera tiles, where one could find his various doctors, confessors, and valets. His meager bedchamber gave onto another equally small room in which he kept his writing desk handy, along with a small library of no more than forty volumes.

  On September 1, 1598, less than a month after installing himself in his so-called factory of God, Philip II signed his last official document as monarch and received the last rites. Paralyzed now by pain, wracked by ever-mounting fevers, and unable to speak, he passed his last days on this earth hearing accounts from visitors of the goings-on in his many dominions, or being read the Psalms by his favorite daughter, Isabella Clara Eugenia. The Prudent King, as Philip would come to be known, was preparing himself for death. But, conscious of how close the end was now, the king wanted to avail himself of two further aids.

  First, there were his beloved relics. In the reliquary of El Escorial, Philip had amassed no fewer than 7,422 different bones of saints. Along with dozens of blackened finger bones, a foot of St. Lawrence charred from his martyrdom, twelve entire cadavers, and more than forty human skulls, there were strands of hair from Jesus and the Virgin Mary, one of St. James the Apostle, and fragments from the cross and the crown of thorns. Philip summarily ordered that these be placed in turn on his eyes, forehead, mouth, and hands, believing that this would ease his pain and banish any evil. Of this extraordinary collection, Sigüenza wrote, “We are not aware of there being any saint for which we do not have a relic, except for three,”1 and he justified the extent of the effort as the king’s aim to prevent any part of the collection falling into Protestant hands. In this way, the monastery became Christendom’s most sacred cemetery.

  Philip had one more command. He ordered certain paintings brought to his quarters so that he could pray before them in his final hours.

  This last order, of course, rang very familiar to me. This king, who in so many other ways emulated his father, Charles V, wanted like him to have his own meditatio mortis before images that he had chosen. In fact, he took his imitation to such a degree that he ordered his father’s coffin opened with instructions that careful note be taken of the arrangement of the body, so that he could be interred in the same manner. As de Prada had said, Philip was convinced that his progenitor’s spirit and his special death paintings would somehow see him and take pity on him, alleviating his suffering.

  Philip no doubt sparked another furor when he requested that one of the strangest items in his collection be brought to his bedside, The Garden of Earthly Delights, the masterwork of Hieronymus Bosch, born Jheronimus van Aken. The painting had barely been at El Escorial five years but its irreverent subject matter was already stirring up all manner of comment at court. Where in the Bible could you find this sea of men and women, naked together in a garden full of fruits and great winged creatures and surrendering to the pleasures of the flesh? But of course no one dared oppose one of the monarch’s last commands, so without as much as a word from the monks attending him, the imposing work—some seven feet by thirteen—was carried up and installed beside the bed, sparing no effort so that the king could admire it as he prayed before it. So why did Christendom’s most powerful man choose to have that particular work beside him while he was dying? The triptych had aroused controversy since it had first been confiscated in the Netherlands from the Protestant prince William of Orange by the duke of Alba and passed through several private hands before ending up at El Escorial. As strange as it was, alien to the Bible in a thousand different details, littered with impossible creatures and packs of terrible demons, Philip—the most Catholic ruler in Europe—would not rest until he possessed it. What was it that the old king knew about that painting?

  This question and others I decided to bring to my next encounter at the Prado. I needed to understand the meaning of this image engraved on my mind, of the great Philip II drawing his last breath in the dawn light, fourteen years to the day since the last stone had been laid in the construction of El Escorial, fearful of his demons, and with Bosch’s panels hanging nearby in the room or the next door antechamber.

  All that remained now was for the Master to heed my silent summons and reveal what lay behind the king’s mysterious fascination with Bosch.

  It was Friday, January 11, 1991, that I returned to the Prado. My memories from that day remain so sharp as to be almost surreal, even after two decades. I wonder if the vividness and colors of the images I have are simply what happens when you spend that much time exposed to the images in The Garden of Earthly Delights.

  Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (1500–1505). Closed: “The Creation.” The Prado Museum, Madrid.

  Whoever reads this, I beg their indulgence—what follows is the result of the impact that a five-hundred year-old painting can have on a young man nursing dreams of understanding the unknowable.

  How could I have been so naïve?

  As any visitor to the Prado knows, you can find Philip II’s tabla mortuoria in Gallery 56a, on the first floor, where it has been for almost half a century. The room is rectangular and very warm—heat pours out of ten grilles concealed around the marble baseboard.

  In order to avoid running into the wrong person, I had crossed the entire museum quickly with a scarf wrapped around my lower face and my sunglasses on. The heat assaulted me as I entered. I realized that there were a number of small areas that feel quite different from the rest of the museum, perhaps due to the paintings they house, or perhaps due to something else difficult to pinpoint.

  As it happened, on that Friday, standing in the middle of the macabre Gallery 56a and clutching my camera bag, I felt something strange. It might not seem like much to the reader, but as I started to remove my outer layer of clothing a weird feeling I had never felt before began to grow in my chest. It didn’t last long, but it was as though the heat, the rushing, the many eyes staring at me from the paintings, and my own irrational fear all overloaded my system, and I began to shake from head to toe. I felt dizzy, and put my bag down on the floor Then, after a minute, I started to recover, and as I felt myself stabilizing I became aware suddenly and very clearly—as I did right after I met Mister X—who I was and what I was doing there.

  I took all this as a sign. Taking a slow, deep breath, I thought, I am ready! This time, my determination was like steel, like fire—a feeling impossible to put into words but very clear to me.

  Everything is going to be all right, I said to myself.

  As I reoriented myself, I became aware of a strange piece of furniture sitting in the middle of the gallery containing Bosch’s paintings. It was unlike anything else in the museum. It was a table, or rather a stand built to hold a painted panel which, as I would learn later, sat in Philip’s small study until the day he died.

  The guides all refer to the panel as The Seven Deadly Sins. It is an unusual circular painting in miniaturist style on poplar wood depicting the temptations of the human soul. What especially catches the eye is that these miniature temptations, or sins, are arranged in a circle contained in a giant, hypnotic eye that looks as if it can see right into your soul.

  Cave, cave. Deus videt,I I read, and drawn by the ring of scenes I walked slowly around the table to take them all in.

  I’d done something right, after all.

  As I orbited slowly around the “eye of God” I had the sense that I was setting something in motion, though I wasn’t sure what. A perception? A vision? Or perh
aps even the spirit that Juan Rof Carballo wrote about, which is supposed to live in that very table. Carballo was a psychiatrist and art expert, and he wrote about spirits that lived in the Prado. He imagined this one, the great spirit, “mocking the critics for not having lived a better life and for not having navigated the reefs and shoals of meditation, completely unaware of this other way of looking at the world.”2

  I wondered, Should I open my mind?

  Or continue spinning around this table like a dervish?

  Or expand my consciousness by losing myself in these hallucinatory scenes all around me?

  But how?

  It suddenly hit me with a start that I was lost in my circling of this apocalyptic work—another example of the craziness I found myself in.

  Two scrolls in the Bosch table carried Latin inscriptions from Deuteronomy which were quite unambiguous. The first, on one side of the table, said, “They are a nation lacking sense or prudence. If only they were wise, they would understand their end and would prepare for it.”3 Below, the second banner read, “I will hide my face from them, I will see what their end will be.”4