by Carlos Rojas
“He probably was right,” I interrupted. “On May 2, in ’08, when the Mamelukes ran down women with their horses, when French soldiers shot men in clusters, those of us not born to be butchers should have abstained from collaborating with the invader. That was a war all of us would lose, hopelessly, regardless of how it turned out. Our obligation was reduced to maintaining the integrity of our personal dignity, but unfortunately we lost that along with the conflict. The day when Fernando VII, recently returned to Madrid, summoned me to the palace to tell me he absolved my past, I felt the same sorrow I had suffered when my children died. I would have preferred a thousand times over to be exhibited in a cage, like the Undaunted, and then executed.”
“The king didn’t have the right to absolve anybody, because nobody could pardon a wretch like him for his greatest sin: having been born,” said Leocadia.
“You sound very Calderonian, Señora,” said Moratín, with a caustic smile. “I don’t know how this predestination can accommodate your liberalism.”
“Grandpa, what’s liberalism?” asked Rosarito.
I preferred to ignore her question, for if I responded I would have to tell her that Spanish liberalism had been reduced to waiting for the death of a man who would, perhaps, outlive us all except her. Perhaps she would understand it by herself one day, or maybe she would never understand it at all, which is what would happen to most of our compatriots. That’s how it is today and how it will probably be the day after tomorrow, when we are ashes and the eternal despot had changed his name in order to be reincarnated with the same ambition and cruelty he’d always had.
“When I went to Zaragoza, after the first siege, I saw the naked corpses of guerrillas impaled on trees along the road by the soldiers of the same king for whom you were librarian and I an incidental painter,” I said to Moratín. “They were in every field, amputated and castrated by saber blows, their eyes empty and eaten by birds. Undoubtedly Godoy was right. It was a lucky man who could withdraw when those horrors were occurring.”
“Do you know what our people did? Do you know about their atrocities during the war?”
“Of course I know about them!” I protested in a rage. “I told you already that as far as I’m concerned, all those slaughters were the same crime. They murdered with reason or without it. Our side did the same.”
“No, it wasn’t the same,” he replied with a passion not at all usual in him. “Our closest neighbor, the one we instinctively tend to identify with in this labyrinth, is from our country and speaks our language. It becomes as difficult to absolve him as to forget one’s personal faults, because he too is the object of our individual conscience . . .”
“Who can talk about conscience nowadays? Who, really, when we all sold ourselves for a dish of lentils?”
“I can!” He interrupted me. “I could pardon the French for those naked, profaned corpses, just as I pardon the crows that devour their eyes. But I cannot forget the crimes of my own people, because in a certain sense they are my own crimes. In Santa Cruz de Mudela, between Valdepeñas and Desdeñaperros, in the small hours of June 5, 1808, horsemen from Castaños surprised two hundred sleeping Frenchmen. Before killing them with axes and pikes, the women cut off their ears and their private parts as they had done earlier in Lerma. Then they cut them all into pieces, one by one, and threw their remains to the pigs. In Cádiz, cradle of our Constitution and our useless freedoms, ten thousand French prisoners were piled into ten old hulks with barely enough room for a thousand. Dysentery, gangrene, scurvy, typhoid fever, and finally cholera reduced their number to six hundred. Many committed suicide and more lost their minds. When sea breezes blew, the stink from the ships infected the entire city.”
“Forgive me, Leandro, but I’m taking the child away. I want to spare her this savagery,” Leocadia intervened.
“But Grandma, I like it very much,” Rosarito protested. “It’s like a fairy tale.”
“It is a fairy tale, my child,” Moratín insisted, while Leocadia looked at him in a quandary. “All this happened in a very distant, very remote country: our country, which according to your grandpa never existed. One day all of us will have to invent it. In the meantime, we should limit ourselves to keeping in mind a past that never should have been. It is believed that sixteen thousand French soldiers and officers were deported to the island of Cabrera,” he continued, staring at me so I wouldn’t lose a single word from his lips. “A Mallorcan was supposed to supply them, but he made a fortune selling the provisions in Palma. On Cabrera, as on the old ships in Cádiz, the prisoners died of hunger, of cholera, of scurvy, of gangrene, and of typhoid fever. The commanders ordered the corpses burned because their companions would dig them up to eat them. Although at that time I was cataloguing the books of the intruder king, I feel responsible for these horrors because they were committed and tolerated by my compatriots. And all this, in whose name? Well, in the name of God and the Desired One.”
“And meanwhile, the others impaled living peasants in order to free them from the Holy Office, or shot them on Príncipe Pío Hill to the greater glory of reason. Nations always justify their crimes in the name of history. Then history transforms their crimes and sacrifices into sarcasm. When I became deaf and spent two years at death’s door, I discovered in the solitude of my silence that a monster lives in each man. Much later I would see the beginning of the tragedy in the Puerta del Sol, through the windows of my studio, as the Egyptian cavalry charged, shooting their guns and wielding their swords, into a crowd armed with shouts and razors. Did you ever stop to think, Leandro, about the spectacle of a war seen by a deaf man? I couldn’t hear the shouts, the shots, the neighing, and the artillery fire that filled Madrid that day. In that sinister quiet, which seemed to split my skull, the battle in the street took on a distant, unreal air, as if life insisted on plagiarizing the nightmares of my dying. Those who killed one another in silence, a silence as interminable as the silence of insomnia, looked more like marionettes than people. Then I understood that if a monster lived inside each man, the monster was always a puppet.”
“Is that when you conceived of the painting of the charge in the Puerta del Sol, which you then painted for the Desired One?” he asked, smiling.
“I conceived of absolutely nothing then. I limited myself to recognizing my true nature as vampire and clown. Almost twenty years later I would buy the Quinta del Sordo and decorate the walls of the house with my image and likeness: monsters that resembled puppets. I believed I had painted my confession and contrition, but perhaps I made a mistake.”
“Why would you make a mistake?”
“Because perhaps I painted the entire history of my country there without realizing it, as Leocadia once said.”
“Perhaps you did.”
“But I wanted to confront history in the early hours of May 3, when I went to the clearings on Príncipe Pío with my servant to sketch the carnage. In the moonlight, crushed to the ground or looking toward heaven with eyes wide open, all the puppets were dead. The whole hill smelled of early rockrose in that dawn filled with hungry dogs and crows.”
Moratín left, not consenting to my accompanying him to the stairs. We said goodbye in the bedroom, and he embraced me and kissed me on both cheeks as if we were Frenchmen. For a moment I tried to ignore the presentiment that we would never see each other again. Leocadia preceded him as she accompanied him to the staircase, and I fell back in the easy chair with Rosarito on my knees. The child was silent and looked at me, expectantly, her large, dark eyes fixed on mine.
“Grandpa,” she said at last, “if men are puppets, who’s playing with them?”
“Time, my little ladybird, time that devours everything, just like mice and wood borers. Only you will remain forever, like an eternal flower, in the middle of the universe and beneath the stars.”
“The Living Skeleton told me at the circus that one day I’d teach a queen to draw.”
“It must be true, ladybird, because he spoke all languages.”
“The child will be the art teacher of a sovereign, Maestro,” Claude Ambroise Lurat repeated to me in a corner of his tent on the Rue du Manège. “She’ll probably do that because your grace has adopted her. One afternoon, on the way to the Royal Palace, she’ll run into an uprising or a riot. She’ll race back home as fast as she can and die of fright a few days later. She’ll have just turned twenty-six. Don’t be angry with me, Maestro, je vous en prie. I read only the back of the cards.” Rosarito fell asleep on my lap. Leocadia looked in the half-open door and I signaled to her impatiently not to wake the child and to leave us alone. She left and closed the door slowly. I made Rosarito a drawing of the Living Skeleton, leaning on a bamboo cane and wearing a chef’s hat on his smooth, hairless head. Naked, except for an apron to hide his private parts, he resembled a boiled, fleshless mummy. All his bones and cartilage were visible beneath his whitish skin. He was small and pigeon-chested, but his thinness sharpened him like a shadow. He told me he had been born in Narbonne and was the son of the count de Saint Germain, the man who never spends two days in the same city and is believed to be six hundred years old. The Skeleton never learned to write, and he read only cards, but he could speak all languages, as if the Pentecostal flame had descended over his kitchen cap.
“Pardon me, your grace, for what I said about the girl. I can’t take it back, though I should have kept silent. To prove my good will, I’ll deal the cards free of charge and your grace can read your good fortune on my lips.” I laughed and asked him what future could await an old man of my age, and Claude Ambroise Lurat shrugged. “One never knows, because the only truth is in the cards. My presumed father, the charcoal seller Lurat, from Narbonne, had no faith in the cards and died not knowing that my mother had conceived me with the count de Saint Germain while he was shoveling burned charcoal. My mother told me all about it on the day of my first communion, when she taught me to lay the cards. She could specify the day and time of any future évenèment if it fell in a leap year. I’m not that good, but I get by in the circus. Let’s sit down, Maestro, and I’ll tell your good fortune right now, bien entendu que pour rien, absolument pour rien.” That was when he said he saw in the cards a man and a woman who did not exist yet. The man was attempting to write a book about me, and the Living Skeleton seemed very disturbed by those messages. “Give me ten sous, Maestro, so I can drink a thimbleful of burgundy.”
Ten days ago I told Moratín that Spain did not exist and was only one of my Absurdities, set up in the depths of the night of history. I sensed immediately that those words were not completely mine. At the back of my deafness and with the ears of the spirit, I thought I knew they had been said by a man at once very different from and very similar to me, perhaps in a century that did not yet exist. I wonder now whether that stranger could have been the same one the Living Skeleton saw in the cards, just as the Prince of Peace I dreamed of in Sanlúcar thirty-two or thirty-three years before turned out to be the same Godoy, old now, and with a darned shirt front, that Moratín ran into this winter, on a Sunday, in the Tuileries. (“You’re Moratín, aren’t you? I’m the Prince of Peace.”) Perhaps in another time and in another world, because each era is a universe as dissimilar from the previous one as the moon can be from earth, a man waits for me and extends his hand to me in the emptiness in order to say: “I’m the one you have been.”
To distract Rosarito, a few days ago I sketched a caricature of myself for her: an old hunchback, all wild hair and whiskers, emerging from the shadows and leaning on two canes. “What are you saying in the drawing?” inquired the ladybug, and at an angle I wrote: “I’m still learning.” Then I began to wonder what I could be learning and concluded that my whole life as a painter was nothing but a search for myself, a clumsy attempt, which always failed, to recount my entire existence in my art. Then I thought of the man who, according to the cards, was struggling to write my biography. Was he perhaps pursuing himself while he believed he would gradually discover me in my paintings?
Ten years ago I painted the walls of the Quinta del Sordo. There, behind the Segovia Bridge, I supposed I would close myself away forever with my frescoes and my paintings. I was in the midst of that when I met Leocadia in I don’t remember whose house. As it turned out, she was from the Aragonese family of the Monegros and a distant relative of mine. When very young she had married a certain Isidro Weiss, son of a Bavarian watchmaker and a Jew, who abandoned her and her two recently weaned children, who by now were a man and a woman. As well read as she was liberal, she was involved in the conspiracies of Mina, Porlier, Lacy, and finally of Riego to impose the Constitution of 1812 on Fernando VII. From politics and its plots she had inherited only debts, sorrows, and the subjects of long tirades about the intrigues plotted in the Café Lorencini or the Fontana de Oro. “Come live with me, in my house in the Manzanares lowlands,” I said to her one day in the Cruz de Malta. “I’m old and lost among my paintings and my servants. I need a housekeeper and someone to talk to, although I can’t hear your voice or mine.” She followed me and I painted her at the entrance to the house, self-absorbed, an elbow on a rock, covered with a veil, among deaf, howling friars, decapitated kings, witches’ sabbaths, crowds of monsters, Fates, buried dogs, drunkards, phantom horses, disputes with sticks, knives, illusions, skeletons, flying wizards, blind men, madmen, witches, phantoms, idiots, and masturbators. When I finished, I asked Leocadia what she thought of it. I was hoping she would tell me that the house was my self-portrait, but to my surprise she replied: “All of this, clearly, is our country seen from the inside: the burning heart of a volcano.” I argued that I had been mistaken, then, since I had wanted to paint on the walls my own nightmares and the hell that lived inside me. Leocadia agreed with a gesture. “We’ve both said the same thing, isn’t that so? Recounting the history of this Spain of ours is the same as confessing hidden transgressions.”
The child fell asleep in my arms and I was surprised to find myself nodding. In the half-sleep of this nap, the lips of María Teresa and the Living Skeleton spoke to me. “If these people are as despicable as we are, what sense do our lives, and theirs, make?” And then: “In 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 in a blur, accompanied by a woman, in a house next to a river that runs over a riverbed of very white stones. Neither the man nor the woman exist yet; but in the cards, he struggles to write a book about your grace” . . . The dream is a river that carries me gradually to the center of the earth. I know I’m asleep and I feel like another man. I’m sitting on the last of three stone steps at the foot of a mill door. But I almost don’t recognize myself, though deep in my soul I find my own being hidden in a different man. The house and landscape are new to my eyes, or at least I would swear I had never seen them. The walls of the mill, made of large stones faded by time, are gilded in the sun of a winter sky. Nearby a stream rambles by, the sound repeated in my ears as if the dream had freed me of deafness. The door is oak, cracked and blackened by a lightning bolt that had twisted the latch and the bolt. In front of me is a poplar grove, all the leaves gone, with large stones half buried among the bushes. Inside I again hear the words of that unknown woman. “I’ll never know who I could have been, as no woman knows who has not been a mother. In fact, I also don’t know what I’m doing here with you.” Again I tried to silence her deep inside, as I had done before when I was talking to Leocadia and Moratín. “I’ll go when I choose to. After all, it’s all the same whether I leave or stay with you, because every relationship between us was always senseless.” Then I become aware of her presence beside me and her voice sounds no longer in my consciousness but in my ears. She says in a different tone:
“If you really want to write the book, let’s get away today. Let’s go wherever you say and I’ll follow you, if that’s what you want. But let’s leave here right away, before it’s too late for all of us!”
THE MONSTERS
The Duchess of Alba
It is well known that María Teresa (she never called herself Cayetana in the forty years of her stay on earth) came into the world with a great deal of very thick hair between bluish and deep black, the same color that would later highlight her white beauty. The truth is she was baptized in her parents’ bedroom by special dispensation that does not appear in the record, since the archbishop of Toledo had ordered baptismal waters not to be used outside of churches except in emergencies, when the lives of the infants were at risk. Her godfather was the confessor to the duke and duchess of Huéscar, and acting as witnesses were Don Miguel de Bujanda, secretary to Don Fernando de Silva; Don Ignacio de Ahedo, deputy to the chief minister of the Indies; and Don Blas Carranza y Cornejo, archivist of her grandfather, the duke of Alba. On her father’s side, María Teresa was the granddaughter of Don Manuel José de Silva, second son of the duke del Infantado and Doña María Teresa Álvarez de Toledo, eleventh duchess of Alba, who would share the title with her husband, according to the terms of their nuptial agreement. Her mother, Doña María Ana de Silva Sarmiento y de Sotomayor, was the daughter of Don Pedro Artal, eighth marquis de Santa Cruz and del Viso, and Doña María Cayetana, countess de Pie de Concha and marquise de Arcicóllar.
