by Carlos Rojas
“More than an Absurdity, perhaps it’s a Caprice, because in the Caprices there’s a tone of grotesque frivolity that fits better with this chimera. Think of Goya’s donkey that reviews its lineage in the family book. That’s what our history is like.”
“I also don’t know why you, you of all people, are writing a book about Goya.” The woman interrupted him harshly. “Goya had twenty children . . .”
“My dear Marina, the supposed twenty children of Goya belong to a fiction generally transmitted and immortalized by Don Eugenio d’Ors, the man who spoke every language with a foreign accent, according to Unamuno, and whose accurate biographical sketch was drawn by Professor Aranguren in prehistoric times, in a work filled with praise of Francoism, which for obvious reasons the aforementioned professor refuses to reprint. To God what is God’s and to each specter its candle, in the burial of this Absurdity. In the baptismal records of the parish churches in Madrid, there are only five registered children of Don Francisco de Goya Lucientes, son of José y Gracia, and Doña Josefa Bayeu de Goya, the sister of his brother. Of the five one survived, the youngest, Francisco Xavier Pedro, dont l’histoire est très banale.”
“I don’t care how many children Goya and Josefa had, and I’m not interested in knowing how many of them died,” she interrupted him again. “The one I could have had with you never managed to be born and I’ll never have another.”
This time he did hear her reply, though he didn’t want to listen to it. He limited himself to hiding it in some corner in the labyrinths of his memory while he contemplated Marina, as if this were the first or last of their encounters. Very blonde and small, her straight hair hanging to her shoulders, in a heavy turtleneck sweater and tight velvet pants, she seemed the same girl he had met in the courtyards of the old university almost thirty years ago. “My God!” he thought, desperately invoking one in whom he had never believed. “Can she see me as I see her? Identical to the boy I was, or perhaps the one I never have been, both mummified, like everything, absolutely everything, in this country where one never grows old with dignity, because life repeats itself here in vain, as the hours would be struck in the farthest reaches of the universe.”
“What’s this all about, woman?” In the end he replied to her reply and did so to become involved in an argument, as unexpected as it was idle, which would free him from his brooding. “Franco is dying. An empire is sinking with its revolution still pending, and you talk to me about impossibilities.”
“I’m talking to you about myself and the children I’ll never have because that’s the way you wanted it. I’ll never know who I could have been, just as no woman knows who hasn’t been a mother.” She spoke in a measured tone and an even quieter voice. Cautiously, looking at her hands, she continued: “As a matter of fact, I also don’t know what I’m doing here with you. It’s all like a nightmare that lasts too long.”
“You can leave whenever you want to. I’m not throwing you out but I warn you, I don’t intend to go after you. I’ll stay in this house until I’ve finished my biography of Goya, where I plan to say exactly the same thing that everybody has said before me as proof of my erudition. I have a grant to write this book from the foundation that bears the name of the last pirate of the Mediterranean, and I plan to meet my obligations as demanded by my respect for such high-ranking patrons.”
“I’ll go when it suits me. After all, it’s all the same whether I leave or stay with you, because no relationship between us ever made any sense.”
In the brick-paved pool in the courtyard of the School of Letters, the water lilies were withering in the lukewarm sun. “Miguel de Unamuno and the poet Villaespesa were walking in the Retiro,” R. was telling him and Marina. “How beautiful these flowers are! I wonder what they’re called, exclaimed Villaespesa. Don’t be an idiot, Villaespesa. These beautiful flowers are water lilies, which appear day after day in all your poems.” It was the spring of 1947, and the monarchist students had nailed the manifesto of Don Juan de Borbón, dated in Estoril, on the bulletin board: “What the country desires is to emerge immediately from an increasingly dangerous interim period, not understanding that the hostility surrounding the Nation in the world is due for the most part to the presence of General Franco in the leadership of the State.” In front of the board monarchists and Falangists were exchanging blows. With shouts and punches some were struggling to tear down the manifesto, others to protect it, while R. spoke to Marina and him about Unamuno, Villaespesa, and water lilies in the Retiro, the three of them disregarding the brawl. In the uproar, Manuel Sacristán and Antonio de Senillosa were shouting and hitting out with their fists. Sacristán would later become Provincial Head of the S.E.U., everything in capital letters, and eventually a Communist ideologue. He would meet Antonio de Senillosa again almost by accident, many years later, during that same autumn, the autumn of our discontent, when the five executions took place, the last political executions of Francoism. They were in a bar at midmorning. He was already very inebriated, and he vomited on the table. “You drink too much,” Senillosa told him as he held his forehead. “It’s the only rational thing you can do in this country,” he replied, retching. Senillosa agreed softly: “Perhaps you’re right.”
In all the shouting he didn’t hear Marina’s last name when R. introduced her, because at that time all the students called one another by their last names. He remembered saying: “I’m Sandro Vasari, a descendant of Giorgio Vasari and three generations of émigrés terroni.” He smiled to himself, thinking that after almost thirty years, Marina still didn’t know who Giorgio Vasari was. Twenty years after their meeting he would have said: “I’m Sandro Vasari, a descendant of Giorgio Vasari and three generations of Italian xarnegos.” Then R. intervened: “Not a single being on earth is capable of knowing who he is.” Much later he would learn, without too much surprise, that the phrase was not R.’s but Léon Bloy’s. “In this joke of a country, no human being is capable of knowing who he is, precisely because here everything’s the same,” he concluded to himself, during a pause in his memories.
No, even if he had known that the phrase was Bloy’s, he wouldn’t have criticized R. He looked at Marina and felt vaguely attracted by her air of withdrawn indifference: of a girl curled up in the center of herself in order to have nothing to do with anything or with herself. At the rear of the courtyard, next to the bottom of the old staircase, the disturbance was increasing. Memory moderated the noise in its waters but repeated the grotesqueness of the shouts until they were transformed into a kind of caricature of sheer nonsense. “Long live Franco! Up with Spain!” “Long live the king!” “We don’t want imbecile kings!” He thought, or at least he believed he had thought, that in another century the forebears of all those boys had leaned over their balconies and out their windows to toss bouquets of roses and early broom as the Desired One, returned from Valençay, passed and they screamed: “Long live our chains! Long live absolutism!” Again he repeated to himself that Spain was not a country because it had never existed as one. It was only one of the Absurdities, illuminated by its own tragic light in the depths of time. Again he felt that those words belonged to someone else, though he pronounced them to himself and only half-heard them. Perhaps to avoid the uneasiness of their echoing deep inside him, he made an effort to stop recalling his first meeting with Marina. He believed then that R. was observing them both, sketching them in his memory as if preparing to portray them another day, with the tumult as his easel and withered water lilies at their feet.
Then, when he made Marina his lover with her cold, dispassionate consent, he did it in a little house surrounded by eucalyptus and almond trees, under the Vallcarca Bridge, its bedroom with its saints enclosed in chimney globes rented out by invisible panderers. It was R. who obtained the place for their meetings and took care of financing them with loans that Sandro would never repay. In a corner of the room, between the recently whitewashed wall and the bureau with the saints, the one that smelled of burning reeds through al
l the cracks in the wood, “which was how all of Guatemala smelled, as I discovered later when I passed through those regions,” there was a sink with a pitcher and basin made of Manises ceramic. Above it hung an old mirror, with a carved frame, that time had darkened and where the light reverberated in long, purplish streaks. Without making too much of it, he always believed the looking glass was false and transparent: its quicksilver backing also a small window through which an unknown third person, implacable and impassive, observed him and Marina.
He told R. of his suspicions, in detailed summaries of their intimacy in the bedroom. Instinctively modest even when drunk, he still felt obliged to recount his affair to him for inexplicable reasons. He wasn’t driven by vanity or moved by an eager exhibitionism. He was even sufficiently rational to reproach himself in vain for his confidences without knowing how to stop them. Once again he sensed that R. was making a note of these episodes, preparing to write them down the next day in his own words. “We’re another man’s rough draft,” he said to himself one afternoon when he was naked, his arms around Marina, and not knowing what to think of that.
The following autumn he had to confess to R. that Marina was pregnant. Sandro urged her to have an abortion, to which she resigned herself with the same silent indifference she had shown earlier when she agreed to go to bed with him. At noon on a day filled with red and gold leaves, R. took them to a house on Calle Moncada, at the corner of Arco de San Vicente, and a stone’s throw from the palace where for many years Picasso’s Las Meninas would be housed. He left them there alone with an old woman who wore a capelet over her shoulders and a satin ribbon around her neck. All cajolery and smiles, the old woman told him not to worry and to come back in five or six hours. He spent them pacing interminably around the tiled courtyard; it led to the stream, and the tiles decorated the rim of an old well. To one side, where perhaps carriage houses and stables had once been located, was a large door leading to some wine cellars. Against a background of cobwebs, demijohns, kegs, and drip trays, workers walked past wearing long leather aprons, as if in the tapestry of a guild. Night had already fallen when he decided to go in the house, through the pinewood door beneath the overhang at the top of a staircase with a stone balustrade. Like someone entering his own nightmare, he found the door ajar and the rooms almost in darkness. Lying on a sofa beneath a shuttered, mullioned window, Marina was waiting for him. An unexpected drizzle was falling outside. Sandro put his topcoat over her head and then, when she was made small and trembling, he put his arm around her waist and they went out to the courtyard, where the smell of acid wine still lingered. At the corner of Calle Princesa they found a taxi that took them back to the park.
“If what we had was completely senseless, why have you met me here? Why did you leave your husband after so many years?”
“That’s a question a woman would ask, precisely because it has no answer,” Marina replied, shrugging her shoulders. “It’s the equivalent of demanding why we sometimes wish we’d never been born and at other times want to be as immortal as stones. All I know is that I always did what you wanted, but now I’m prepared to do what I want. I’ll leave when it suits me.”
“If you’d rather wait until I finish alcoholizing myself, I make no guarantees. I immodestly postponed death or madness because I want to finish my life of Goya first. I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
“You’re free to kill yourself however you choose, even if I’ll never have your children. As for the rest, you’ll never finish the life of Goya. You know that as well as I do.”
“Go to hell!”
Actually, he was the one who left, slamming the door. Stumbling from side to side and almost falling, he went down the stone staircase, slipping on the moss that appeared on the treads and backs of the steps. He crossed the garden, which had turned into grassland that autumn, and took the path to the oak groves. The day was gray and calm, the mountaintops enveloped in motionless fog. He stopped only when he reached the river, high after the recent rains. There he lost track of time, listening to the murmur of the water flowing around the polished, whitened rocks. He had forgotten about Marina, himself, Goya, and the house R. had lent them so he could write the painter’s life. “By now,” he said to himself aloud, “Franco must have died,” and his indifference caught him by surprise. Only then was he fully aware of being alive, and he swore again to himself that he would finish that book, even if there was no one on earth capable of knowing who he was, and even though everything passed away, like tyrants, rivers, clouds, and shadows.
As the flow of the river continued among rushes and brambles, memories dammed up the invisible waters of the past. “In rivers the last water is identical to the first of the waters that will come. Like the present day,” R. had said to him in September and in this same spot, paraphrasing Leonardo, while the current carried away the reflection of the heavens. “Qu’est que tu as fait de ta jeunesse?” He smiled to think of how poetry, the word in time, transformed into clichés as it passed from one century to the next. “Just a trifle and of course less than Rimbaud, who at least knew how to forget about his youth as a genius and a queer to delve into other hells significantly more sordid.” A kingfisher, brilliant green, flew out of the branches to peck at the water.
He didn’t see Marina very often at the university after the abortion. Without avoiding each other, they were growing more distant, perhaps because neither one had anything left to say. When Sandro and R. finished all their courses, she hadn’t been in a classroom for a year or two. By then monarchists and Falangists had also stopped fighting in front of the bulletin board. The United Nations lifted its sanctions against Franco’s Spain, and Eisenhower’s America was preparing to form an alliance with her. From Estoril, Don Juan de Borbón wrote to the caudillo, who almost a quarter of a century later would be dying now in El Pardo: “If Your Excellency is moved by the same desires for concord for the good of Spain (which I certainly cannot doubt), I am completely certain that we shall easily find the practical formula that can overcome present difficulties and establish definitive solutions.”
Four or five years later, Sandro had left for the United States. He arrived in time to read in the Times the statements of Agustín Muñoz Grandes, former commanding general of the Blue Division and current minister of the army, who had recently landed in New York. “Here you have a war criminal who has not lost his admiration for Hitler’s Germany.” The general wore the insignias of the Blue Division, the Iron Cross First Class, and other Nazi decorations. Sandro had a contract to teach Spanish language and literature in a secondary school near Newburg, Vermont, where twenty-four years earlier Lorca had written “Poems of Lake Eden Mills.” He found all of Spanish literature, except for the Quijote, immeasurably boring. Compared to English or French literature, it seemed the work of metaphysicians of irrationality or realists terrified by their own senses. He completed a doctorate in art history at Columbia University “because, after all, the Catalan Romanesque, El Greco, Velázquez, Goya, and Picasso endorse the roots of someone named Sandro Vasari through three generations of immigrant xarnegos and justify the existence of a culture that could express itself in words only in Cervantes.”
After earning his doctorate, he began his teaching career at the University of Colorado. In the summer of 1973, after two divorces and two children by his second wife, whom he would always refrain from seeing, he returned to Barcelona for the first time since 1955. By then his parents had died, and in their apartment of a middle class insistent on not forgetting its national origins, he spent almost two weeks shut in and alone. He entertained himself by contemplating the fake Murano red glassware behind the glass doors of the cabinet; the imitation porcelain naiads like those that adorned the Bucentauro, the sculpted ship from which every year the Dux officiated over the sponzalizio di mare, the marriage of Venice to the Adriatic, when the sea was still as green as the mountain pastures, according to D’Annunzio; the busts of Camillo di Cavour and Giuseppe Garibaldi, yellowed by time be
neath the mirror; the large prints of androgynous slaves sculpted by Michelangelo, and of Michelangelo himself, flat-nosed and pensive in the solitude of his workshop, contemplating his completed Moses; the old editions of Goethe’s Travels Through Italy, the covers lined in red satin and the title on the spine, where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe listened in Malamocco and Pellestrina to the verses of Tasso and Ariosto sung by gondoliers, In exitu Israel de Aegypto / Cantavan tutti insieme ad una voce, / Con cuanto di quell salmo e poscia scripto; the reproductions of The Birth of the Lord by Piero della Francesca, with its chorus of five shepherdesses also singing their hallelujahs and its magus king pointing at heaven with his index finger, and La Calumnia by Sandro Botticelli, with the naked truth also pointing her finger at the firmament.
He drank alone until all of it, Piero, Botticelli, the gondoliers, the slaves, Moses, Michelangelo, Garibaldi, Cavour, the Adriatic, the Bucentauro, the naiads, and the false Murano glass became confused, darkened, and eventually merged into the same closed shadow. But not even then did he manage to sleep. For the first time he was ambushed by a tenacious insomnia that Sandro could not overcome or explain. He lost track of the days and nights until he had a presentiment that the endless sleeplessness was not his but had been imposed by someone he did not know as an implacable punishment for faults he knew nothing about. Then he told himself that insomnia was the expectation of a dream or nightmare that in due course would free him from his punishment. One morning at daybreak (he would never know after how many) he finally was able to fall asleep. He did not wake until the middle of the afternoon, refreshed in body and spirit, as if he had come back from a swim in a very sunlit ocean. He would have sworn he’d had an incredible dream, which he had forgotten, perhaps forever. A telephone call woke him completely. R. had learned of his return from sources he refused to name. He invited him to supper that same night in the Pasaje de la Trinidad, a stone’s throw from the old brothel whose residents had inspired Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, thereby creating Cubism. He accepted immediately.
