The Valley of the Fallen

by Carlos Rojas

  “Still, some dead always fiercely resist disappearing,” Marina disagreed. “They also survive entire generations conceived after their time on earth.”

  “I suppose you’re referring to Federico García Lorca.”

  “I was thinking of Lorca,” she agreed in a quiet voice, looking down at her feet. “But I wasn’t alluding to his work but to his death. They never could deny it or make it be forgotten.”

  “They tried in many different ways,” replied Sandro. “In September 1936, a few weeks after the crime, a paper in Huelva declared, unabashedly and with no embarrassment, that Lorca had been murdered in Madrid by Marxist elements and his body tossed in the gutter. Another daily from the same province said he had been arrested and killed in Barcelona, where he had been hiding in the home of a shopkeeper. The Burgos press again situated the event in Madrid in order to round it off with the supposed upset of French literary circles at the news. The little marquis de Merry del Val declared that Lorca, whose literary merits were, in his opinion, inferior to his political zeal, had been a dangerous agitator, condemned to death by a military tribunal. Later, a journalist of the Falange from San Sebastián paid homage to the dead man, calling him a coreligionist and denouncing ‘the 100,000 violins of envy’ that had taken his life forever. Franco himself eventually declared to a Mexican correspondent that the loss of Lorca was regrettable, but in Granada no poets had been shot. Even in 1956 La Estafeta Literaria echoed the article by Schonberg—‘Enfin, la verité sur la mort de Lorca! Un assassinat, certes, mais dont la politique n’a pas été le mobile’—that appeared in Le Figaro Littéraire, to change the political crime and its systematic concealment into vengeance taken by homosexuals. It was necessary for the regime to enter into its death throes so that a book like the one by José Luis Vila-San Juan could be published and we could find out the names of the real guilty parties. One of the killers boasted in the bars of Granada: ‘We came to kill Federico García Lorca. I put a bullet up his ass for being a faggot.’”

  “The dead bury the dead and Lorca has buried his killers,” murmured Marina. “We wouldn’t refer to any of them if they hadn’t murdered him.”

  “Yes, I imagine this must be their certificate of glory, although there are some who still encourage it. If each man is capable of every crime, each people has its leprosy and its weeping, as León Felipe would say. Victims and their killers pass away, but countries survive them. More than the death of Lorca himself in that immense crime of our civil war, I am astonished and repelled by the reaction of so many right-thinking souls, who tell you even today that when they killed him they did him a favor, because he had already written his best work. This is our people, and this is the leprosy that has always consumed it.”

  In silence they entered the town, its streets, with their boundary stones, paved in pebbles. At Marina’s suggestion they stopped in a tavern to eat. Behind the wooden bar covered with zinc, a man in a stained apron was arranging some glasses. He greeted them with a nod while they found seats along the whitewashed wall. In the fireplace kindling flared under some logs. In the rear and through a half-open door, the sound of pots and pans grew louder. On recently painted wooden shelves, bottles and cans of food were lined up. Next to the fireplace and almost at the feet of Sandro and Marina, they saw two large baskets filled with apples and dried mushrooms. From the ceiling hams hung on hooks. A gilded cage with a stuffed green bird inside, two bullfight posters from Figueras, and a couple of calendars with pictures of naked women decorated the walls. Old laborers or peasants were sitting at the round tables, watching television and waiting for the news. It smelled of vinegar, scorched meat, quicklime, and old straw.

  On the screen a message from the pope was being read. “With our trust placed in God, we follow reports of the ill health of Your Excellency, to whom we renew assurance of our fervent prayers invoking divine help, and reiterate from the heart the consolation of our apostolic blessing. Paulus PP. VI.” The reply was read immediately: “I have received with emotion the loving message from Your Holiness and am deeply grateful for the prayers raised to the Lord for my sake, and for your blessing, which is a great consolation. The most devoted son of Your Beatitude, Francisco Franco, Head of the Spanish State.” Other news followed, all of it fairly significant. Monsignor Cantero Cuadrado, archbishop of Zaragoza and member of the Council of the Realm, had left for Madrid in a car at one in the afternoon. In Palma de Mallorca, another bishop, Monsignor Úbeda Gramaje, asked for prayers for the Caudillo. “Given the recent news regarding the illness suffered by His Excellency the Head of State, I ask all the faithful in the Diocese of Mallorca to join my prayers for the health of the illustrious patient. Priests should include this intention in their liturgical celebrations.” Ministers were gathering in the presidency of the government. At two-thirty the ministers of industry and the army arrived.

  Sandro drank a couple of whiskeys in three swallows, while Marina ordered roast lamb, onion soup, and chicory salad for the two of them. He barely tasted the meat and escarole but consumed an entire bottle of red wine, and had three cognacs with his coffee. Marina ate slowly and silently, not looking at him. The farmers watched them out of the corners of their eyes, amid slow whispers. A shepherd who had seen them earlier in the fields greeted them with his toothless smile. His gums were black, like those of a purebred dog. “This is the memory of justice in this country of butchers and clowns,” Sandro said to himself again. Suddenly, behind his forehead, from the darkest springs of his consciousness, he heard his hidden voice again: “Those killed in silence, a silence as interminable as the silence of insomnia, looked more like marionettes than people. Then I understood that if a monster inhabited man, this monster was always a puppet.” He closed his eyes, pressing his hands against his temples. He thought he had returned to the labyrinth of the Great Pyramid, where he became lost in that dream he had remembered in the mill. All the sounds in the tavern, including the commentaries on Franco’s slow death, had been silenced, and the voice of another man interrogated him behind his eyelids. “Do you know for certain what our side did? Do you know their atrocities in that war?” it asked. “Of course I know them!” he replied. “I told you before that in my opinion all those slaughters were the same crime. They murdered with reason or without it. Our side did the same.” “No, it isn’t the same,” the voice argued. “Our closest neighbor, the one with whom we instinctively tend to identify in this labyrinth, is from our country and speaks our language. It becomes as difficult to absolve him as to forget our personal guilt, because he is also the object of our individual conscience . . .” “Who can talk about conscience in our time?” it interrupted. “Who, really, when we all sold ourselves for a dish of lentils?”

  He stumbled and staggered to the lavatory. The man in the stained apron followed him slowly with his eyes as he dried some glasses. Marina did not look up from the stone table. The bells in the town rang sonorous, spaced hours. Gradually the tavern emptied out. Only the old shepherd with the black gums remained in a corner, beneath the bullfight posters, to offer her his toothless smile. He saw Marina get up to whisper to the man in the stained apron. He didn’t hear her words, but he could hear the clink of a ring on the zinc when she placed her palm on the bar. The tavern keeper nodded his agreement with everything the woman was telling him. He dried his hands on his apron, and they disappeared together toward the courtyard and the kitchens. Then the shepherd left some coins next to his empty glass and went out to the street, where the wind from the mountains was beginning to blow.

  Sandro had passed out on the floor of the W.C., his back against the wall and his head fallen on his chest. He had vomited on himself, and his clothes stank. From time to time his hands trembled on the tiles. The tavern keeper put his apron over his shoulder and carried Sandro as if he were a butchered cow. On the street, the shepherd saw them arrange him, more or less laying him out on the back seat of the tavern keeper’s old car, with Marina’s lap as a pillow. Then the man in the apron got b
ehind the wheel and the car disappeared upstream, clattering and clanking.

  The tavern keeper put Sandro to bed in R.’s house and refused to accept the money Marina offered him. The hand she shook when they said goodbye was as hard as stone, but he barely dared to touch her. When she was alone, Marina undressed and cleaned Sandro with a sponge, telling herself that it resembled the washing of a corpse. Then she wrapped him in the red blanket from Momostenango that served as a bedspread; she lit the fire in the hearth in the study, and left the door to the bedroom ajar. In the Royal typewriter was a sheet of paper that seemed to conclude a biographical sketch. “An order from the King to Godoy himself demanded the registration and confiscation of María Teresa’s documents, justifying this with mean-spirited reasons. The magistrate who heard the case against the suspects in the inheritance has been able to determine that by using disloyal servants, papers had been taken from the Duchess’s chest at the moment she expired. Godoy took advantage of the lawsuit to acquire everything the Queen had cast aside, including Velázquez’s Venus with a Mirror, along with all the other paintings that had belonged to María Teresa. Beggars, servants, the son of Don Francisco de Goya Lucientes, and the jester Benito would never see any part of all that legitimately belonged to them.” She picked up the sheet at a corner with her fingertips and turned the roller in order to continue reading the last paragraph. “The belongings of the Prince of Peace were sequestrated in 1808 following the revolt of Aranjuez, and his canvases were moved into the Cristales storehouse and an inventory made of the works of art on his estate. Entry 122, published in 1919 by Aureliano de Beruete, described: Two paintings five feet, four inches high by six feet, ten inches wide, one representing a naked Venus on the bed, the other a clothed woman of the lower classes, by Francisco de Goya.”’ She poked the fire, which tended to go out, making an effort to think of nothing but the burning heather. Through the window she looked at the woods, where they had carried logs to the tripods. In the vast gray landscape of the valley, naked branches would gleam at times. Before dusk the first snows would arrive. Helplessly she evoked “The Dead,” the last story in Dubliners, which R. had lent to her in translation when she dropped out of the university after the miscarriage. At a winter dance, a melody awakens in a woman the memory of a dead man whom she had loved. When she returns from the party, while she is falling asleep, her husband begins to share his memories. Then he notices in the sleeping face of his wife that beauty is beginning to give way to age. He feels deeply and strangely joined to the dead boy who used to sing that distant song. Through the window a heavy, silent snow is falling on Dublin. Intangible time melts into interminable serenity, while the snow crosses the sky as if the final hour of all the living and all the dead had arrived in order to conclude silently in nothingness.

  She heard coughs and groans from the bedroom. Sandro was sitting on the bed. He was shaking and holding his head, pressing his palms against his ears. Marina saw him again as she had found him that morning, at the bottom of the mill: absorbed in a world unknown to her where her words lost all meaning and her very presence was an intrusion.

  “What did you say? Were you calling me?”

  “No, no, I must have been talking in my sleep.”

  “You called me.” Her tone vacillated ambiguously between affirmation and question.

  “I didn’t call anyone, Marina, I assure you.” He shook his head again, then looked at her with squinting eyes, as if he couldn’t quite place her image. “Leave now, I beg you. Go and leave me alone in this house with my damn book.”

  “Go? Where would I go?”

  “Wherever you like!” He began to be exasperated. “Go back to your husband, if he’ll take you back, or go to the devil! Choose for yourself, because it makes absolutely no difference to me! Before you said you’d leave whenever you pleased, because our affair was always senseless. Well then, leave right now, whether you want to or not!”

  “No, I won’t leave.” All hesitation had disappeared from her voice. Her tone was firm but polite, as if she had given herself an unbreakable order, ripened in long reflection.

  “What’s this about? Why do you contradict yourself this way? You were prepared to leave when you felt like it!”

  “I can also disagree with myself, because at bottom I know very well I ought to leave you. Still, I have other reasons for not doing it.”

  “What reasons are those? Death and damnation! Get out once and for all and leave me alone! I don’t need you to work! I don’t need you to get drunk or to go crazy!”

  “No,” replied Marina deliberately, “you need me only to survive.”

  “This is my business. I’m my only master.”

  “I’m also mistress of my staying. I won’t leave you. That’s my final word.”

  “If necessary, I’ll throw you out bodily!”

  “No, Sandro, you won’t. Can it be you don’t understand that I can’t leave you as I left my husband?” Perplexed, she seemed to waver for a moment. Then she said: “As you abandoned your children.”

  Enraged, he hit her on the mouth with the back of his hand. Marina fell back on the red bedspread and seemed more astonished than hurt as she looked at him with wide-open eyes. In a lethargic gesture she raised her thin blond eyebrows without actually frowning. A thread of blood crossed her half-open mouth. In vain she tried to resist when Sandro, naked and howling like a savage, threw himself on her. He hit her again, this time with his closed fist, on her forehead and ears. Then he took her though she was dressed, immobile and enervated, like a grotesque mannequin. With open eyes she looked at the white ceiling. Through her tears, it was changing into a slow snowfall that silently moved across space and time in the empty firmament of stars and men.

  Panting, Sandro collapsed beside her. In the fireplace in the study, a log split by the fire fell with a dry, muffled sound. Marina wiped the blood from her lips with a hand that did not tremble. Suddenly she bit her knuckles to stifle an unexpected scream that was burning her throat. She did not hate Sandro. She thought that perhaps she had loved him once, though she had forgotten when. All her rancor, a cold, distant rancor that one would feel toward a mythological monster, was for R. He could foresee their destiny, hers and Sandro’s, in some inexplicable way, but he had no right to determine it, even when Marina knew he was hidden nearby, watching them dispassionately like an old voyeur. One could say that even the story by Joyce, with the snowfall into which the ceiling was gradually transformed through her tears (the story lent by R. almost thirty years earlier) was another piece of that puzzle, summarized in a hell made to her measure and Sandro’s.

  Sandro moaned again between gasps, his head wrapped in the pillow. Under his brows he heard that voice, identical to his, in stray pieces like those in a dream. “Grandpa,” a little girl was saying to him, “if men are puppets, who’s playing with them?” Immediately he heard himself respond: “Time, my little magpie, time that devours everything, 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 drawing to a queen.” “It must be true, little magpie, because he spoke every language.” Trembling, he dozed off without silencing the whispers inside his ears. Quietly, and knowing he didn’t hear her, Marina murmured:

  “No, I’ll never leave you in this state.”

  At midnight they found themselves sitting in the study, eating bread and foie gras. Marina washed it down with wine and Sandro avidly drank glasses of mineral water. They spoke of trifles, avoiding each other’s eyes. The snow that had threatened in the afternoon didn’t appear this time. The wind blew the storm out to sea and then quieted down on a cold, clear autumn night. The last report stated that at 23:10 hours the clinical situation of His Excellency the Head of State was stable. He was resting quietly and his vital signs were constant. They said his level of consciousness was normal.

  TAUROMACHY

  THE DREAM OF REA
SON

  Wild Bull

  The painting had been in the former collection of the duke and duchess de Veragua, and an old copy, executed perhaps by Esteve or Vicente López, was the property of the marquis and marquise de Casa Torres. It is oil on canvas, seventy-five centimeters wide by eighty centimeters high, shown for the first time in the exposition Art in Tauromachy, which opened in Madrid in 1918.

  It represents a life-size head of a fighting bull, which fills almost the entire canvas, against a mottled sky. It is an enormous, bluish-black animal, with a white muzzle and wide-spread horns. Blood drips from the end of one of the pikes and spills onto his left flank. Different blood, a more fiery red, fills his inordinately staring eyes around the glittering pupils. Also covered in blood, though dimmed and resembling cinnabar, is the tongue of the wounded, panting animal. A salmon pink cape, its other side silvery, spills over the thick neck. One would say the animal carried it off in the same charge that gored or killed a banderillero, because two broken barbed darts still dangle from the bull’s side.

  The subject is a live bull in the middle of a bullfight, Gudiol states unnecessarily. Even more incredible, José María de Cossío refrains from citing the painting in Bulls. In this case it would have been better to omit the world, because for the painter the entire universe was reduced to the head of this animal. The tiers of seats and men disappeared. Even the firmament disappeared, because the background of jasper or feldspar has nothing to do with the heavens. Perhaps it is a glimpse of hell, or it might be that hell itself has turned into nothingness in this moment of truth. Our point of view, outside the painting, is the same as the painter’s, a step away from the beast. If he or we were to extend a hand, we would touch the horns or the panting maw. (“His eyes did not shut / when he saw the horns close by.” And the executioner in his joy at fulfilling his duty: “We just came from killing Federico García Lorca. I put a bullet up his ass for being a faggot.”) Although he paints from memory, Goya looks closely into the eyes of the bull. Perhaps in them he sees us, as in the eyes of the beast we can sense him.