The Valley of the Fallen

by Carlos Rojas

  In reality The Third of May, in Madrid was very different from how I had conceived of it at first. Then I saw and sketched the firing squad, the bayonets, and the dark gloomy sky as a kind of savage nocturnal bullfight in which a minotaur with more heads than the hydra sacrificed men instead of having them fight bulls. The victims fell one after the other, and, in fact, the painting lacked an end, just as the crimes committed in the name of history had none. Something told me, however, in the only voice my deafness could not silence, that this was not the entire truth. Then I imagined a living specter who rose from his knees among the dead to denounce the atrocity in the name of all the dead. I conceived of him with his hands pierced by bullets, as I had seen many men who had been shot, their palms punctured when they had irrationally attempted to protect their faces from the bullets. The man, that ragged one in the yellow trousers, grew then into the center of the painting to confer a brand-new meaning upon it. With his arms opened wide, as if nailed to the cross of Saint Andrew or ready to place a couple of invisible banderillas, he stopped not only the firing but also time in the center of the canvas. For eyes I gave him those of the bull, just as I had painted them in the first days of my convalescence.

  Fifteen years have passed since then, and the world of yesterday, of María Teresa, Pepe-Hillo, and the Prince of Peace, has disappeared forever. As Moratín would say, the coronation of a king like His Majesty Don Carlos IV and the French Revolution do not coincide with impunity. And we, men like Moratín and like me, have passed with our world and now waste away in exile. Yet somewhere in Madrid, my beggar with the yellow trousers continues to stop time and the firing, his arms spread wide as he insists on shouting something to his executioners that I shall never hear. I would like to believe that in a century and a half he will still be there, making that brutal moment eternal in order to denounce all the torments committed on earth to the greater glory of faith or reason. I would also like to believe that by then another man, who perhaps is myself, as the Living Skeleton would say, will live obsessed by that painting of mine and eventually come to realize its hidden meaning and its manifest truth. Perhaps at this very moment in another very distant time, that double of mine whose words I would swear I hear sometimes, sits down at a table and writes: “Silently, with restrained astonishment, I wonder who I am and who Don Francisco de Goya Lucientes was.”

  THE MONSTERS

  Pepe-Hillo

  José Delgado Guerra was born in Sevilla, in the Baratillo district, on March 14, 1754. He was baptized three days later in the Colegiata de San Salvador; his godfather was José de Misas, first cousin to a renowned picador. His father, Juan Antonio Delgado, was a dealer in wine and oil from Aljarafe, or the Morisco Strip, as the county of Niebla was still called then, according to Cossío. He was established in Sevilla not long before the birth of Pepe-Hillo to look after the shipping of those spirits, but was soon ruined. When he had barely learned his first letters, the only ones that Pepe-Hillo ever knew, his father placed him as a cobbler’s apprentice. The only thing known about his mother is her name, Agustina Guerra. By a strange coincidence of fate, she gave birth to the future bullfighter in the same year that his most outstanding rival, Pedro Romero, was born in Ronda.

  His father was infuriated when he heard about Pepe-Hillo’s escapades at the slaughterhouse in Sevilla, fighting with yearlings, young bulls, and even full-grown bulls in the pens, almost never spending time at the cobbler’s workshop. The slaughterhouse was the leading school of bullfighting in the kingdom, according to the historian José Daza, and it undoubtedly was for Pepe-Hillo. He was discovered there by Joaquín Rodríguez, Costillares, when the boy used his own shirt for lack of a cape. At that time Costillares was competing for primacy among bullfighters with Juan Romero, as he would later be the rival of his son, Pedro. Costillares had also trained with yearlings at the slaughterhouse and moved on to be the inventor of the volapié and the verónica in their modern versions. He was a rational bullfighter, consistent and original, who, booed once at an advanced age by the actor Isidro Máiquez, would shout at him with cold logic from the barrier: “Señor Máiquez, Señor Máiquez, this isn’t the theater because here you die for real.”

  Costillares was pleased by Pepe-Hillo’s disposition: his tenacious, joyful courage, his ambitious audacity, his imaginative and haughty postures. Perhaps he was somewhat frightened by his stunning pride—blind to danger, bending at the waist, filled with grace—precisely because in the bullring you die only once and always for real. In any case, and in spite of the protests of the wine dealer, he took on Pepe-Hillo as a matador’s assistant. In the bullfights in Córdoba, in 1770, he was already second sword. Pepe-Hillo had just turned sixteen at the time. Four years later he was married in the Colegiata de San Salvador to María Salado. Soon his fame had spread throughout Andalucía, where they already preferred him to Pedro Romero. In Madrid, on the other hand, everyone still swore by the Romero name. When the Junta de Hospitales de la Villa y Corte could not arrange for the Romeros to fight in that bullring, they turned unwillingly to Costillares and Pepe-Hillo.

  In 1778, Pepe-Hillo and Pedro Romero were both at the bullring in Cádiz. Pedro Romero, a Herculean man, serene and immune to envy, told him during an interval: “Friend, what God took from you in strength He made up for with grace.” Pepe-Hillo was challenging a bull with his beaver hat before killing him with a volapié like those of Costillares. Pedro Romero fought his with the comb he kept in his hair net. That same year they competed again at the Real Maestranza in Sevilla, where Pepe-Hillo suffered one of his twenty-five serious gorings. Pedro Romero, who had never been wounded by a bull, risked his life in a parry to save him. That was the beginning of the deep friendship between the rivals, attested to by Romero himself.

  In 1784, Pepe-Hillo appeared as sole matador in Burgos, in one of the bullfights celebrated in honor of the Count de Artois. According to a manuscript in the collection of Ortiz Cañavate and cited by José María Cossío, Pepe-Hillo was so outstanding in courage and skill that “several times he even killed a bull while holding a watch in his left hand instead of the killing cape.” In Madrid in 1789, in the celebrations of the coronation of Carlos IV, Pedro Romero and Pepe-Hillo again appeared in the same bullfight. Armona, the director of the Villa y Corte bullring, drew lots to determine first place in the ceremony that acknowledges a bullfighter as a full-fledged matador; it fell to Pedro Romero. Then, hesitating, he asked: “Well, Señor Romero, since it has been determined that you will fight first, do you pledge to fight bulls from Castilla?” That imperturbable creature replied: “If they’re bulls that graze in a field, I pledge to; but Your Grace must tell me why you have asked me this question.” The director shrugged, while Pepe-Hillo listened to them, silent and livid, and then read a letter from José Delgado Guerra, in which he had first stipulated in his contract to fight only bulls from Andalucía and Extremadura, because the ones from Castilla were thought to be difficult and dull-witted killers.

  The bullfighters presented a complete contest in the morning and in the afternoon. Pedro Romero dispatched the bulls from Castilla and Pepe-Hillo the ones from Andalucía, as had been agreed. The last one of the afternoon, which was José Delgado’s, was from a Castilian herd, the result of a joke or a mistake on the part of El Tío Gallón, who separated them in the bullpens and despised Pepe-Hillo. According to Pedro Romero, José Delgado became furious when he saw its colors and then made a series of lackluster, shaky passes that astonished and irritated the audience. The kill was sounded and the surly beast, which until then had demonstrated a fondness for the haven under the royal balcony, pressed its haunches against those boards and Pepe-Hillo could not shift or square him for the kill. “Friend, leave it, we’ll get him out of there,” Pedro Romero said. Pepe-Hillo stared at him without replying, and went straight to the bull. His rival moved away but observed his attempts to attract the bull because he had a presentiment about the goring. That happened immediately, when the bull seized and turned over the uneasy
Pepe-Hillo. In the gesture of a cynical great lord, or in anticipation of a character out of Valle-Inclán, Pedro Romero picked up Pepe-Hillo, bleeding and stunned, carried him to the box of the duchess of Osuna, and left him at her feet. Then he squared the bull and dispatched him with a single sword thrust.

  Néstor Luján has understood better than anyone else the sociological significance of Pepe-Hillo’s bullfighting. For the first time, and as a result of his rivalry with Pedro Romero, enthusiasts were divided significantly in their preferences. The indiscretions of Pepe-Hillo and the somewhat superficial showiness of his bullfighting would turn him into an idol of the masses, a term that included the aristocracy. A man obsessed with renown became the first bullfighter of great multitudes. His bullfights on working days interrupted projects. If he fought on Sunday, the fiesta lasted until Tuesday in order to comment adequately on his passes. In the bullring, commoners and nobility rubbed elbows in order to kneel and remove their hats when the king entered and then to cheer enthusiastically for Pepe-Hillo. “The Spaniards are good, peaceful, and enthusiastic,” the Prussian minister concluded in the language of an explorer when he informed his court about those customs. If the people seemed remiss in becoming civilized, the most cultured part of the nobility became debased with dedicated passion. To the greater glory of Pepe-Hillo, they copied the speech of the slums and disseminated it in their salons. In the meantime, Pedro Romero, indifferent to prestige and applause, would persist in the purity of his art, followed always by a minority of true connoisseurs. When he finally retired from the bullring, weary of the crowds and his conflict with Pepe-Hillo, he had given to bullfighting a precise mental esthetic, which was the meaning and reason-for-being of the most elaborated of spectacles.

  The absence of Costillares and Pedro Romero meant that Pepe-Hillo was sole master of the arena. Year after year, as he approached half a century, his faculties diminished and the gorings increased. He created the Aragonese pass or behind-the-back cape work, and perfected dodges, parries, and evasions with the cape folded several times and draped over the forearm. Thirteen times he was thought dead when he was removed, wounded, from the bullring. Yet when asked whether he planned to retire, he replied, smiling: “I’ll only leave here with my guts in my hand.” In 1796, five years before he fulfilled that promise, he published in Cádiz Tauromaquia, or the Art of Bullfighting. The book was written for him by a friend, José de la Tixera, since Pepe-Hillo had difficulty signing his name. But many pages of the book seemed dictated by him and written down word for word. His essential advice for young bullfighters is the triple repetition of an imperative: courage, courage, courage.

  Because of so many indescribable reckless acts, the people had a presentiment of an obscure panic, which perhaps Pepe-Hillo himself was not aware of. When he fought in Sevilla, he always went down on his knees and asked for the blessing of his father, the former wine dealer from the Morisca Strip. Then, covered in scapulars, he prayed for a long time at the altar of his favorite superstitions. A sad seguidilla seemed to anticipate his tragic destiny. “What pity I feel / when I see El Hillo / praying in the chapel of Baratillo!” Pepe-Hillo did not believe too much in that commiseration. He knew how savage spectators could become; their applause was the primary purpose of his life. He had seen them go after old bullfighters with prods and sticks when they sought refuge in the safety enclosure, or took cover, so they would return to the center of the ring. In the blink of an eye, at a time and in an arena he refused to imagine, that could be his humiliating end. Yet he refused to desert his destiny, as Pedro Romero had done. He had already said it many times. He would abandon his profession only with his guts in his hand.

  In the meantime he squandered wealth and women, which always returned to him renewed. Cockfights, Gypsy dances, too much drinking, too much eating, brothels. Uncouth and ugly, he had the masculinity of an arrogant suicide, and it charmed lower-class women as well as ladies with the bluest blood. From the time of the celebrations of the coronation, when Pedro Romero carried him, wounded, to the duchess of Osuna, people wagered on which of the nobility’s boxes he would be taken to after each goring. He dedicated part of his wealth to buying rustic and urban properties in Sevilla. He attended two regular get-togethers there, one on Calle Gallegos and the other at the Tomares water kiosk, across from the king’s warehouses. For some time he was thought to be almost tempted to abandon the bullring and retire to his properties, where everyone treated him like a monarch. Yet his legend preceded him and obliged him to live cheered on by the public, if only by chance. When he was watching a bullfight in Calatayud, a bull jumped into a row of seats filled with people. The authorities, as terrified as the crowd, hesitated. Pepe-Hillo took a sword, mounted a picador’s horse, and galloped to where the incident had occurred. He faced the bull, waited for his charge, and killed him with a single lance thrust.

  On Monday, May 11, 1801, a complete bullfight was announced for the Puerta de Alcalá bullring. In the morning eight animals from Gijón and Briceño, and in the afternoon another eight from the herd of José Gabriel Rodríguez, in Peñaranda de Bracamonte, for Pepe-Hillo, José Romero, and Antonio de Santos. Some time earlier Pepe-Hillo had renounced his prejudices against Castilian bulls. Now, like Pedro Romero before him, he was obliged to measure himself against every animal that grazed in a meadow. The night before the bullfight, Pepe-Hillo rode out to Arroyo Abroñigal to see the bulls that had been purchased. He liked the look of a black bull with wide horns from Peñaranda de Bracamonte, one they called Barbudo. He demanded it for himself and no one dared argue with him.

  The king and queen attended, as did Goya, who in his deafness sketched passes in the new, grotesque silence that now surrounded bullfights. In the morning, Pepe-Hillo was knocked down and suffered scrapes and contusions. In the afternoon, still in pain from the fall, he faced the beast that he himself had chosen for his own glory. Barbudo was the seventh to leave the bullpen and Pepe-Hillo must have realized when he saw him that he had been totally mistaken when he thought he had detected his spirit. The bull took three lances, always running from his fate, and three pairs of banderillas; he was cowardly wounded, and dangerous in the way he came out. The time came to kill the animal and Pepe-Hillo delivered two naturals and a chest pass, while Barbudo swung around and threatened to trap him against the barrier. Pepe-Hillo stabbed him while the bull stood still and thrust half the sword into his left side. Barbudo in turn caught him by a fold in his trousers and threw him flat on his back in the ring. The blow dazed the bullfighter, and the bull plunged his left horn into the pit of his stomach. That is the tragic instant that Goya captured in Etching 33 of his Tauromaquia: the tragic moment when the pain returned Pepe-Hillo to consciousness so that he would die aware of his suffering and clutching the shaft of the other horn. Then Barbudo held him in midair, swinging him back and forth for a whole minute, according to José de la Tixera. The autopsy report spoke of a terrible wound that cut in two the colon, stomach, liver, and right lung. The entire large lobe of the liver passed into the thoracic cavity, and several vertebrae and ribs were broken. The autopsy pronounced his instant death, although other less realistic and more pious versions conceded him a terrified quarter of an hour to receive the sacraments. The picador Juan López came late to the efforts to distract the bull, but he speared the bull from his rearing horse. José Romero finished off Barbudo with a couple of sword thrusts. Don Manuel Godoy was in Portugal at the time, winning the inglorious War of the Oranges. His mistress, the queen, wrote to him from Aranjuez, recounting the goring of Pepe-Hillo. “He was killed by a single thrust of the horns, on the spot, without the Unction arriving in time. At the moment of aiming the sword, the bull caught him, picked him up by the sternum, which is in the chest, cut open his stomach, went as high as his liver, cut the intestine in half, broke four ribs on one side and six on the other; he left all his blood in the ring and was on the horns for a time. Many people left the bullring, Manuel, my friend, and I, who don’t like the bullfights, what
will happen now?”

  November 7–8, 1975

  —At 15:30 hours, faced with the considerable increase in gastric hemorrhage alluded to in the previous report, and his lack of response to medical treatment, a new surgical intervention was decided upon. To this end, His Excellency the Head of State was moved to “La Paz” Hospital Complex, where he was immediately placed in the care of Professor Hidalgo Huerta, with the collaboration of Doctors Serrano Martínez Cabrero and Artero Gurao and the surgeons Paula Seminario and Sagrario Parrilla. The team for anesthesia and recovery comprised Doctors Llauradó, María Paz Sánchez, and Francisco Fernández. Supervision of the cardiorespiratory constants during that tragedy was the responsibility of Doctors Vital Aza, Señor, Mínguez, and Palma. The operation revealed the existence of multiple new ulcerations of the stomach, which were bleeding profusely. For this reason they proceeded with a partial gastric surgery. The intervention, which lasted four hours, required the administration of five liters and six hundred milliliters of blood. All of this was well tolerated. At the time of the writing of this report, at 21:00 hours, vital signs are within normal range. The prognosis is very grave. Tomorrow, at 9:00, a new medical report will be issued.

  “If the road to Berlin were open, it would not be a division of Spanish volunteers on their way there but a million Spaniards offering their services,” Sandro quoted Franco in the winter of 1942. Two years earlier it was two million fighters that the Generalissimo had offered to fulfill the “mandate of Gibraltar and the African vision.” Then Sandro referred to a character of Huxley’s, unknown to Marina, who asserted that death was the only absolute value not yet corrupted by men in spite of their efforts to degrade it. He wondered aloud whether those million bayonets stationed at the entrance to “La Paz” would impede his passage to a secret death, after asking him for identification. After all, you can do anything with bayonets except sit on them. Charles Maurice Talleyrand-Périgod, master of the art of political survival, pointed this out very well. Immediately afterward he began to speak of other bayonets, the ones in The Third of May, 1808, in Madrid: The Shootings on Príncipe Pío Hill. He compared and identified them with the horns of the bull of death painted by Goya (“the one you didn’t want to see in the original for fear you’d be left blind”), and with the horns of another of Goya’s bulls goring a picador’s white horse. He ended by describing the slaughter in the Prado as a bullfight in which a minotaur with multiple heads sacrificed herds of men. Marina half-listened to him, not understanding his words very well and almost not crediting his existence. For more than ten days Sandro had not tasted alcohol and had drunk ice water with his meals. Yet he expressed himself now with the reckless urgency of intoxication, hastily summarizing à bout de souffle some incomprehensible hypotheses for her that he had been working on obsessively. From the huge bullfight that The Shootings had been, he went on to refer to time halted by art in the midst of history’s atrocities.