The Valley of the Fallen

by Carlos Rojas

  “Your Majesty ought to forget the dead or at least be silent when you remember them.”

  “Can you forget the children you buried and your French disease?”

  “No,” I said, “no I can’t.”

  “Then we’re even, because nobody’s more than anybody else.”

  Memories became entangled like cherries; they settled, and then suddenly a memory caught fire and blazed like a torch, at the back of time. Looking at his recently completed portrait, I saw the boy he had been so many years ago, when I painted the portrait of the family. He wore gray stockings, sky-blue breeches and coat, his chest crossed by the sash of Carlos III. Even then he had the prominent belly of a prematurely aged man beneath his narrow shoulders. In the presence of everyone the queen said to me: “We’ll have to find a bodice for this boy. He’s almost growing boobs like a girl.” He controlled himself, not protesting and not blushing; but beneath his eyebrows, as long and thick then as they are now, I could see the gaze of a wounded fawn that my María del Pilar Dionisia had in her cradle. Then, in no time, the light in his eyes hardened into an expression of hatred mixed with hypocrisy. With the same rancor and shrewdness in his eyes, I painted him with his family. A few nights later, I dreamed he was looking at me in that way, as if he were confronting his mother, and I woke up shouting the useless howls of a deaf man. When I uncovered the painting, he was the only one who refrained from praising it. Standing apart from the others, it seemed he was smiling at the celebration of the portrait, and not its veracity. Yet in the eyes of his father, His Majesty the king, there were tears of joy. He hit me again on the back, guffawing and congratulating me at the same time.

  More than a quarter of a century had passed since our first meeting, and his slap was no longer the blow that knocked me down that day, for the years had aged him very quickly. He had put on weight, his muscles had weakened beneath his skin, and his goiter spilled over onto his chest. Nonetheless, he still woke at five o’clock every day of the year, and never used wine, coffee, or tobacco. He slept alone, and they said he no longer visited the queen at night. It was rumored that after the queen lost the ability to become a mother, he feared being damned if he carried out his conjugal duties for pleasure. The king heard two masses every morning, read the lives of the saints, had breakfast, and went down to the palace workshops. There, in shirtsleeves, he worked as a blacksmith, a clockmaker, a carpenter, a locksmith, or a saddler. He was very skilled, and sometimes he offered foreign ambassadors a pair of shining boots that had recently left his hands. Then he would visit the stables and fight the stable boys with rods. At one time he could defeat them all, but later on they allowed him to win because he lost his breath before his strength. At eleven he received the royal family and the minister of state for a quarter of an hour. Then he ate lunch with great appetite, and always alone. He went hunting every afternoon if he wasn’t leading a procession. He was escorted by the captain of the guard, the master of the horse, a gentleman-in-waiting, the beaters, a surgeon, and another physician. When he returned he dispatched with all his ministers in half an hour. Later he would offer a violin concert to some intimate friends, accompanied by the cellist Dupont. I was told that he played very badly, although he thought himself a virtuoso. He would skip entire lines of the staff, which Dupont in turn attempted to ignore. After the music there was a card game, during which the king tended to fall asleep holding his cards. He had supper at nine with the queen and went to bed at eleven sharp. I remember that I tried to kiss his hand to thank him for his compliments, but he hugged me to his chest. “Someday we’ll see if you’re as good at fighting with rods or at Leonese wrestling as you are at painting,” he said to me, laughing. “Come back one morning and try it with me. Then I would play the violin for your pleasure, if you weren’t deaf.” By reading his lips and in a flash of conscience, I was surprised to find myself wondering: “God of heaven and divine Reason, why are we alive?”

  “When he was young your father, Señor, was the strongest man I knew. And he was always the one with the simplest soul and best heart. If he had been born a cobbler or a tanner, perhaps he would still be alive and happy.”

  “At his age. And if he had been born a tanner or a cobbler, he probably would have starved to death in the war, like your wife,” His Majesty replied. “Thanks to you liberals, we’re entering an era that exempts neither kings nor rabble. Now we’re all made of the same ashes.”

  “You’re probably right, although guilt for the times we live in lies with all of us. At times I fear being immortal, when I think of the horrors I have survived. During the war and the invasion, people died of starvation on the streets of Madrid. Twice a day they picked up the corpses in the gutter and took them away in creaking wagons, pulled by scrawny mules, from the parish churches. The very old and the very young were the first to die. Nursing infants with monstrously swollen bellies, and old people reduced to skin and bone, like mummies, who dragged themselves, trembling, away from the doors to their houses so they would not die in the presence of their families. They were followed by the men and then by the women, who were the strongest. They paid for loaves of onion and flour, moldy hardtack, and even scraps of garbage with their jewels. Then they traded entire houses for a handful of acorns. We ate rats and dead people, because there were many cases of cannibalism, not only on the Rastro but on the Prado as well. The rabble chewed on their dead, but so did some nobles whose blood was almost as pure as yours. In the meantime, Señor, you were taking music and dance lessons in Valençay.”

  “The Intruder King saved your life. I know that very well.”

  “King José baked in the palace, although it’s obvious he was almost as destitute as we were. His servants would distribute part of that bread to the people, and on occasion he did that himself. Thanks to his kindness, Josefa did not die of hunger that fall. She succumbed the following spring, along with twenty thousand other Madrileños, but by then there was no more flour or wood, even in the palace. Once, unannounced, King José came to our house to bring us a brazier that was still warm. I gave him a glass of water, all that I could offer him, and he confessed his despair. The crown was a sentence he did not wish to serve at that price. ‘Dans ce pays de Malheur, je reve toujours des peres et des frères aupres des cadavres de leurs femmes et de leurs enfants sur la chaussée.’ He had written to his brother, the emperor, to present him with his resignation. Napoleon did not even bother to respond.”

  “Stories of thieves and their lackeys,” His Majesty said with a yawn.

  Spots of yellowish spittle dried at the corners of his lips. He lit another cigar after biting off the end and spitting it on the floor.

  “You ceded those thieves the crown when you returned it to your father, so that he in turn could hand it over to Bonaparte. If you, Señor, had remained steadfast and not given in to the demands of the emperor in Bayonne, the war would not have taken place. Naturally, in that case they would not have welcomed you in Valençay but thrown you into some dungeon.”

  “And what was I going to do in France, imbecile, in the hands of that bandit we all thought was invincible? Let myself die? This is man’s greatest madness. Cervantes himself says so in Don Quijote, though I don’t remember anything else from that book. You didn’t die then either, not from hunger and not in the war. You had the indecency to survive because you were too much in your right mind to die or kill in my name. You and I are alike, cut from the same cloth, as I said. Let’s allow the dead to bury the dead and look each other in the eye. I need you just as every man needs a mirror, so I won’t go mad. You, and for that matter the entire country, are mine, because I didn’t end up better or worse than my subjects. That’s why you’ll have to wait for my death, the death of a despot who doesn’t want to die or abdicate now, in order to free yourselves from me!” His exaltation diminished somewhat after reaching the point where he was shrieking. Soon, smiling and pulling my ear as if I were a hunting dog, he said to me: “I don’t think I’ll allow you to return to
Bordeaux. I can’t do without you.”

  “If you want to arrest me, Señor, you should do it personally and right away. Here, in Madrid, I always sleep with a cocked pistol under my pillow. I’ve made my will, disposed of my possessions, and every night I think about Saturn so I won’t forget who I am. In a few days I’ll take the stage back to France. Before that, if they come at dawn one day to arrest me, I’ll fire a bullet into my brain at the precise moment they break down the door.”

  I didn’t hear my voice and he didn’t seem to listen to me, though he took careful note of the hard conviction in my words. He lowered his eyes and with the hand that held the cigar he gestured as if he were driving away absurdity or tedium.

  “Why would I look for your destruction when it pleased me so often to prevent it? You have very powerful enemies, but I’m not one of them.”

  “I humbly beg Your Majesty to allow me to continue. When the war was over, I painted the portrait of Juan Martín Díez, the Undaunted. He was a peasant from Castillo de Duero, almost as strong as your father in his youth. In May 1808 he took to the mountains and fought the French, at the head of a band of shepherds. When peace came, he commanded thousands of men, and the Central Junta had made him a general. He read with difficulty, but his eyes burned with intelligence, and he had a natural talent for describing this hell that tomorrow they’ll call our history. He told me how, in your name and to defend your divine rights, they had put out the eyes and cut off the ears of a woman, then paraded her naked on the back of a donkey through Fuente de la Reina, with a sign on her chest that read: ‘This is the end that whores to the French always come to,’ and then they nailed her while she was still alive to the door of the church. Twice he was defeated and his forces decimated in the field and twice the villages of Guadalajara emptied out to follow him. In those lands people adored him almost as much as you because he had given them a reason to survive and to murder. The French governor himself learned to respect him almost as much as he feared him. The Undaunted sent him a letter, written in his own hand, inviting him to join his guerrillas ‘because it was always more honorable for a soldier to serve liberty than a tyrant’s ambition . . .’”

  “What’s the point of all this? He soon betrayed me and had to be executed, just as he had crucified that woman on the door of the church. That’s all there is to it.”

  “He made the mistake of still believing in liberty after your return, and he was one of those who imposed the Constitution on you in 1820. Last year, your divine absolute power restored, with the help of other French troops he was arrested in Castillo de Duero. Locked in an iron cage and carried in a cart, he was displayed for weeks on end to his own neighbors, and in all the villages where they first set fire to the houses and the harvests to follow him, as if he were a god. The same men who fought in his bands spat on him, stoned him, jabbed him with their pitchforks, shouting ‘Long live slavery! Long live the absolute King!’ He struggled like a rabid dog behind the bars, perhaps more enraged by the irrationality of men than desperate over his own fate. Still on the scaffold, almost dead, he fought with the executioner before he was garroted. There, in the public square, they burned his remains to the cheers of the crowd. The stink of burned flesh must have reached all the way to the palace.”

  “It didn’t, but when I learned he had been executed, I exclaimed: Long live the Undaunted!” He smiled. “It was my tribute to a dead enemy.”

  “It was what it was; but I’ll never end up like that, not your victim and not sacrificed by this country, where you say you can look at yourself as you can in my eyes. That’s why I sleep with a pistol, ready under my pillow.”

  “Sleep however you like and go back to Bordeaux whenever you feel like it.” He yawned openly, his mouth filled with smoke. “I had hoped you’d die here, as an old man, so I could give you a funeral worthy of Apelles. I would have displayed your body in the Puerta de Alcalá, watched over by the royal halberdiers and mounted troops. In single file, all the way to the Ventas del Espíritu Santo, people would have waited nights on end to see you dead. The rabble comes to both executions and funerals. All ceremonies are part of the same circus.”

  Circus. Almost two years have passed since I last saw His Majesty the king, and now I’m dying in Bordeaux. One of my hands froze this dawn. I saw it lying rigid on the coverlet, as distant and immobile as if it belonged to someone else. I didn’t try to wake Leocadia so as not to upset her with my dying, which I thought would be brief. Two or three hours later I unexpectedly recovered the use of my fingers, but I couldn’t control their sudden tremors. At the same time my eyelids became heavy and I supposed that death was half-closing them. “It doesn’t matter very much,” I said to myself, “because this winter I was going blind. I drew with the help of a magnifying glass, though I kept my hand very steady until last night.” Leocadia was frightened by my pallor and sudden fits of stammering. The doctor came and then returned later with a colleague. His grave, pensive air confirmed my belief that my case was hopeless. I turned my face away on the pillow in order not to read on their lips the foolish things they were saying to me. Vous étes un grand homme, un peintre de la Chambre. On va vous soigner! Then Moratín turned up here, Leocadia must have brought him up to date regarding my difficulties, because he hadn’t visited me for days. For the first time I noticed that his hair, a blond between sandy and straw-colored, was graying and turning white. He seemed uneasy, but he could not hide his feminine curiosity about my dying. He sat near the bed, close to the pillow so that I could read his lips. “Leandro,” I said, “this is ending. Take care of Leocadia and little Rosarito for me when I’m gone. I’d just like my son and grandson to come before I’m dead. Do you think I’ll get to see them?” “Death is something that always happens to someone else,” he said ironically. “You and I have the duty to outlive the despot so we can return to Spain.” “Spain? Spain does not exist. It’s one of my Absurdities, established long ago in the dark depths of time.” He smiled, moving his graying head. “I’m not far from thinking the same thing.”

  “Spain does not exist. It’s one of my Absurdities, established long ago in the depths of memory.” Why am I assailed, now and then, by the conviction that these words are not mine? Another man is saying them, perhaps very different from me in appearance, in another century that hasn’t existed yet. In this case my voice is his, although he doesn’t exist yet. Spain does not exist; but perhaps Moratín is right. It is our duty to return there when the despot, Moratín, and I are ashes. It will truly be like returning to one of my Absurdities, to the “Ridiculous Absurdity” or the “Raging Absurdity.” I’ll be a different man on that tomorrow, although our witches’ sabbath of a country is basically always the same. I’ll be someone who before being incarnated appropriates my voice, perhaps to try it out. As I said to His Majesty the king, at our last meeting, it is strange that a man may last for eighty years and then realize that his earlier actions have ended very differently from what had been intended. Perhaps no one knows himself in this world because no one knows exactly who he might have been.

  Circus. I’ll never go back to the circus on the rue du Manège, where I would take Rosarito to forget about myself, watching the acrobats suspended for a moment between heaven and this hell we call earth. There animals turned into clowns and men played with beasts, as in the garden of earthly delights. Elephants, tigers, lions, crocodiles, serpents, and bears punctually recited their lessons. They seemed to know everything; but they had forgotten how to kill. There Claude-Ambroise Seurat, the Living Skeleton, told fortunes in any language and said to Rosarito that one day she would teach drawing to a queen. Then he shuffled the cards, took me aside, and predicted that the girl would live only to the age of twenty-seven. I became furious but the Living Skeleton shrugged. He only read the future. He didn’t condemn or flatter anyone.

  That day he insisted on telling my fortune. I told him it wasn’t worth the effort, because an old man like me had his hours numbered. He refused to give me rea
sons, but he assured me that something in me disconcerted him very much, but he did not know precisely what it was. I yielded to the persistence of Leocadia and Rosarito, or at least I believed then that I was submitting to their pertinacity. Claude-Ambroise Seurat shuffled the cards, dealt them out on the table, and nervously picked them up again. Then, ignoring us, he spent an eternity contemplating the French deck, his head sunk between his long, bony palms. “It’s all very strange, Maestro,” he finally said to me. “At these points I don’t see you but another man, whose name I don’t know because perhaps he hasn’t been born yet. I see him confusedly, accompanied by a woman, in a house beside a river that runs over a bed of very white stones. Neither the man nor the woman exists yet; but, in the cards, he is trying to write a book about your grace.” He shook his insolent head, as if making an effort to frighten away the shade of an absurdity. “Give me ten sous, Maestro, so I can drink a thimbleful of burgundy.”