The Valley of the Fallen

by Carlos Rojas

  “Let’s leave here right away,” Marina repeated, her arms folded over her chest as if she were making an effort to contain a shudder. “Let’s go and never come back to this country.”

  Sandro shook his head and then repeated promises to get away as soon as he turned in his book, which was almost finished. Then they would go to Colorado and spend the summer with his children. Marina would be delighted to live a few months with them. In reality he spoke without hearing himself, vaguely aware that she wasn’t listening to him either. Looking at her in the dark night of the window, where small snowflakes were beginning to fall, he thought of a Piero della Francesca. One of those cold, serene female profiles in the frescoes of the Church of San Francesco, in Arezzo, or the Diptych of Federigo da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, in the Uffizi in Florence. The same decided will appeared to have traced their common features, beneath which the passions veiled a hidden fire or a resplendent light whose moderated brilliance barely showed through. Five hundred years earlier, Piero had loved a woman almost identical to Marina, although his art was then characterized by a supposed emotional coldness. Loving her, he immortalized her obsessively in almost all his works, perhaps because he also knew she was very similar to him. Then Sandro thought of another Piero: The Birth of Our Lord, in the National Gallery. Beneath its reproduction and on the sofa in his house, he had made love to Marina, before the autumn of our discontent, when they began to meet in those dissolute bars behind the old Municipal Slaughterhouse. He had never noticed then Marina’s resemblance to the Virgin, the one kneeling in prayer next to the choir of shepherdesses. If he identified her now with Piero’s beloved, he did not feel certain that he, and only he, was the one who remembered the frescoes in Arezzo and in the Uffizi. Perhaps another man saw them in a century closer to the Florentine painter and silently was helping him to evoke them. Sandro refused to say his name.

  That night they went to bed naked, not touching beneath R.’s sheets and blankets. Sandro dreamed about the recently painted Wild Bull. On an easel of wood smoothed with a plane, the wet oil painting gleamed. A woman who was still young, whom Sandro recognized in his dream without recalling her name, talked to him beside the canvas. She was dressed all in black, her clothing and lace trimming from another time, as if she were going to a masquerade ball. Sandro asked her whether she thought he was mad, convinced all the while that he had lost his mind since he could not hear his own voice. And he could not understand what she replied, her words vanquished by the same silence. Facedown on the table at the foot of a transom, the mask looked for paper, pen, and an inkwell and nervously scratched some sentences in a small, very clear hand: “Of course you are. Raving mad. How did you dare to incite him so that he would leave the painting and really gore you, you fool. This bull makes me feel naked down to my bones. He looks at me as if I were a rag doll.” Sandro burst into laughter, and laughing, he awoke.

  The sun shone on the whitewashed walls in the house. Dressed in jeans and a sweater, Marina was sitting beside the window in the studio. She was motionless, as if she had spent part of the night waiting for the snow to cover the earth and the heavens to shine. The television was on and from the auditorium of La Paz hospital complex, the minister of information and tourism read the latest medical bulletin about Franco: At 8:30 a.m. on November 8, the clinical evolution of His Excellency the Head of State is the following: he has spent the night sleeping. He awoke from anesthesia at 3:00 a.m. and has been sedated to avoid pain. His vital signs remain normal. The cardiocirculatory situation has shown no change. From the beginning of yesterday’s surgical intervention and up to the moment of this current report he has received seven liters and two hundred milliliters of blood by transfusion. At the end of the surgical intervention an arteriovenous circuit breaker was implanted in his right forearm for hemodialysis. The thrombophlebitic process in his left thigh continues unchanged. The prognosis continues to be the same.

  Immediately afterward there was a report on the true nature of the “arteriovenous circuit breaker.” It consisted of placing a tube in an artery and another in a vein, so that the artery brought enough blood to the hemodialysis, or artificial kidney, and then returned to the organism through the other tube. The dialysis purified the patient’s blood, placed in contact with the artificial plasma through a semipermeable membrane. In peritoneal dialysis, used then on the dying man, the peritoneal membrane functioned as a semipermeable membrane, cleaning the toxins accumulated in the organism.

  Then Sandro thought of Morocco: Diary of a Flag, the chronicle and memoir of the campaign written by Franco at the age of thirty. The official cornetist had a Moor’s ear to show to the other legionnaires. “I killed him!” he boasted. He had found the Moor at the bottom of a gully, hiding among some rocks. Aiming his carbine at him, he had him walk up to the road together with the other troops. “Fren, fren, no kill!” the prisoner pleaded. “No kill! Now you’ll see. March over to that rock and sit down.” The prisoner obeyed, trembling, and the cornetist fired at him. Then he cut off his ear, as a kind of trophy, as if the Moor were a recently killed fighting bull. That was not, Franco stressed, the first exploit of the young legionnaire. In a new edition that appeared after the Civil War, the paragraph had been censored.

  Outside, the snow sparkled in the silent woods. Looking at it, he recalled the naked whiteness of the woman he had dreamed about. Laughing, Sandro had pulled off her mourning clothes with the black lace trim, like a mask ready for a costume ball. They made love at the foot of the easel where the fresh paint still gleamed on that head of a vicious bull, on a floor badly made of creaking wooden boards. Sandro didn’t hear her laughter or her shouts because a silence of eternal ice had filled his head. Then he told the woman that in his deafness her shrieks of pleasure felt like those of a woman crucified. “I always lived crucified,” he thought he read on her lips. “I didn’t want to be born.”

  Du Sang, de la Mort et de la Volupté. He passed his eyes over the thickness of trees in order not to think about the dream whose final and perhaps only meaning he did not want to admit to himself. Up the slopes and beneath the blazing blue sky, the snow seemed to turn pink in the late-morning light. Behind the first hilltops, in a hollow covered with ferns, lay a pond as round as a medal. Sandro and Marina had discovered it that autumn, when they had come across the spot, almost by accident. On the final slopes the trees disappeared, and the foliage was reduced to hawthorn, lost yews, and fields of carline thistle. The images of a man and a woman lengthened in the water, turned golden by midday, but far from the shore the pond grew dark and deep, like a trap. For Sandro, the clearest memory was of silence. Perfect quiet in a world still without cicadas or serpents, without wind and birds. He thought that deafness would illuminate his memories and evoked what he had written one dawn, totally drunk, in his notebook: “Saturn is my self-portrait and only tonight did I finally realize it.” Then he had weighed a coin in the palm of one hand (“Francisco Franco Caudillo of Spain by the Grace of God”). On an impulse he threw it into the water. It must have fallen in the exact center of the pond, because the waves that began to ripple across the surface were perfectly concentric with the contour of the banks. It was Marina who noticed that they traced the outline of a bullring, with high rows of seats. An arena and its stands ironically disappeared as it grew.

  Only then, as he recalled that morning before the snows a few weeks later, and told himself that the pond would freeze in the gully, he thought he could detect the meaning of everything he had been writing recently about Goya, in the chapter he would call tauromaquia. Marina refused to see the original of Wild Bull for fear she would go blind. According to Néstor Luján, after centuries we know almost nothing about bulls. We don’t know why all the bullfighters named Pepete died in the ring, or why it was always May, not April, that was the cruelest month, the one that left the most blood and the most dead in the arena. Rudolf Arnheim observed that the bombing of Guernica, on April 26, 1937, and the sketches for Picasso’s mural came u
nder the sign of Taurus, the celestial bull. Now Sandro amplified the coincidences of the constellation, through time and to limits that were incomprehensible for calculating probabilities. Between April 20 and May 21, two events took place: the massacre of May 3, 1808, and Goya’s display of his painting, The Shootings on Príncipe Pío Hill, on a triumphal arch celebrating the return of the Desired One, May 11, 1814. The most savage of bullfights, the one in which the minotaur multiplied in order to charge men with bayonets, denounced history forever as the masses shouted: “Long live our chains!”

  If the wide-horned black bull painted by Goya during his convalescence seemed to transform into the firing squad in The Third of May in Madrid, another wide-horned black bull killed Pepe-Hillo, in Goya’s presence, on May 11, 1801. Still under the sign of Taurus, though in another century, a bull as dark as night fatally gored Joselito on May 15, 1920, in a horning identical to El Hillo’s. If the 1801 bull was named Barbudo, the one in 1920 was called Bailador and was the fifth bull of the afternoon. Another bull that also appeared in fifth place killed Granero on May 7, two years later. He was a skittish beast like Barbudo and short-sighted like Bailador. He caught Granero next to the barrier, as Barbudo had caught Pepe-Hillo, also by the leg, and finished him off on the ground with horn thrusts to the head. Again in fifth place, the bull Bombito appeared in the ring and gored Varelito on April 21, 1922. As a consequence of the wound, the matador died on May 13. The four bullfighters were gored when it was time for them to kill the bull.

  The snow was beginning to freeze and turn golden among the trees. On May 2, 1808, always under the same constellation and in the Puerta del Sol, kilometer zero in all Spanish territories, the contemporary history of a reckless people began, which since that time has charged savagely in search of itself without success. He thought of a Christmas Eve, in a year he did not care to remember, when the car in which Sandro was driving his wife (his second wife) and two children skidded on an icy highway from Boulder to Denver and turned over an embankment of snow frosted like all the snow in those woods. At Boulder Hospital his wife (his second wife) was declared technically dead. Even so, the doctors struggled bravely to revive her, perhaps by means of a desperate logic that reduces realism to achieving the impossible. An hour later they succeeded, and two weeks later they discharged her and she returned home, where Sandro was a tangle of guilt-ridden contradictions for having escaped the accident unharmed.

  His wife (his second wife) was a rationalist and an agnostic. Even so, she never concealed what she had experienced when she was dead. She said she suddenly felt deprived of substance and transformed into serene consciousness, undertaking a journey through not time and space but brilliant peace and light. Her pilgrimage was suddenly interrupted when she became conscious of physical pain in the hospital bed. She was in distress and was perfectly lucid, because suffering isolates and defines. She remembered everything: her name, her address, and even her final scream before the car overturned. Sandro said to himself then that perhaps there was a special, nontransferable hell for Spaniards, a people responsible for their slow suicide over the centuries, where each citizen would awake in an empty bullring that would be eternity for him. There, and although his name was Sandro Vasari, a descendant of Giorgio Vasari and three generations of Italian xarnegos, he too would find himself one day perpetually imprisoned in the center of the arena and the infinity of concentric circles of bleachers, facing the bullpen and with an ironic, useless watch in his hand (a watch attached to a long silver chain, like Pepe-Hillo’s), under the same pitiless sun of May 2, 1808.

  “Early this morning, while you were sleeping, R. telephoned from the United States,” Marina whispered suddenly, returning him to the other reality. “He insisted that I not wake you. He wanted to talk to me alone and ask me how the book on Goya was going. I said you were constantly working on it and said it was almost finished.”

  “That’s the truth, more or less.”

  “He seemed to believe me.” She hesitated for a moment, and then added: “R. was in Boulder, Colorado, and was calling from your wife’s house, your second wife, according to what he said.”

  “He’s very free to do that,” Sandro interrupted drily. “He can telephone from another life of mine, if he wants to.”

  She wasn’t listening to him. Reverberating on the frozen snow, the sun lit her profile again as if she were one of Piero della Francesca’s figures. Looking at her hands crossed on a knee, and without raising her head, Marina asked:

  “Sandro, do you think I’m going crazy? Tell me the truth.”

  “You must be if you really came to me after all these years and if in reality you’re here now with me. In other words, if we truly are who we think we are.”

  He rested his palm on Marina’s shoulder and observed his own hand as if it belonged to someone else, while the sun turned the veins stretching from his wrist to his knuckles blue, and reflected on his wristwatch. It was exactly 10:00 in the morning.

  “I know very well who you are, but every day I know myself less and less,” Marina repeated. “If we left here, then perhaps I could find myself.”

  “We’ll go, Marina, very soon, and maybe earlier than you suppose. The book will be finished before you know it.”

  “I hope it’s not too late. I hope I don’t really go crazy then, if I haven’t already lost my mind.” She paused, and Sandro felt her shoulder beneath his palm harden, as if it had turned into stone. “Before dawn and R.’s call, I got up and dressed because I couldn’t sleep. It was still snowing, but soon the wind would rise and sweep away all the clouds. I turned on the porch light and sat in this same chair, next to the window. That was when I saw it, as soon as the light went on . . .”

  “What did you see, for God’s sake?”

  “It was Goya’s bull and he still had that cape caught on the banderillas still piercing his back. He stood motionless in a clearing in the wood, under the oak trees. He must have seen me at the same time, because he approached the window slowly, shaking the snow off his forehead, tossing his head. He came up to the edge of the windowsill and began to stare at me so fixedly I thought I would sink while still alive into his eyes. They were bloodshot and wide open, like they are in the painting; but his gaze wasn’t an animal’s, it was a man’s, a man chained in hell. I don’t know how long we looked at each other; perhaps eternities. Suddenly, very slowly, he made a half turn and was lost among the trees. I sat contemplating his hoof prints on the snowy ground. More flakes, the last ones, finally erased them at daybreak.”

  THE CAPRICES

  THE DREAM OF REASON

  Blind Man’s Bluff

  In 1788 Goya created his last four works for the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Bárbara: three sketches and a cartoon, that is to say, a large painting on linen to be embroidered. According to Gudiol, the drawings were The Meadow of San Isidro, The Hermitage of San Isidro, and The Country Meal. As for Blind Man’s Bluff, one of the artist’s most reproduced creations, the Prado has the sketch and the painting. The Meadow of San Isidro and The Hermitage of San Isidro both belong to the same museum. The Meal is the property of the National Gallery in London. All the oil paintings had belonged to the duchess of Osuna and were acquired by the museums in 1896, at the public auction of her family possessions.

  The three sketches are of different sizes. The Meadow of San Isidro is a canvas 44 centimeters by 94 centimeters. The Hermitage is much smaller and almost square; it measures 42 centimeters wide by 44 centimeters high. The Meal is the smallest of those sketches: 41 centimeters by 26. The sketch of Blind Man’s Bluff, another oil on linen, has dimensions similar to those of The Hermitage of San Isidro: 41 centimeters by 44. The corresponding painting or cartoon, which today is on the ground floor of the museum, appears horizontal in memory; but its width is 2.69 meters and its height measures 3.5 meters.

  After Blind Man’s Bluff, The Meadow of San Isidro is the best known of these paintings. In May 1788, Goya wrote to Martín Zapater to tell him he had p
roposed doing a cartoon of the celebration at the San Isidro fountain during the festival dedicated to the saint. The painting is singular in the work of the artist. The man who in his youth broke the contour of his figures and in his old age would say he could not perceive more than shadows and lights, forms and volumes advancing and retreating, had recourse here to the fine points of a miniaturist and individualized all the figures with the detailed rigor of a Breughel. An angled slope, where wild mallow and vines grow, extends in the foreground. At the top of the hill a row of figures, dressed in light or gaudy colors and visible in the distance, enjoy the leisure of the festival. Two girls chat or gossip under a parasol. A lower-class girl in a red bolero jacket and neck scarf pours wine for a couple. Many gentlemen wear feathered two-cornered hats and silvery jackets, but there are a good number of the short jackets and tight sashes of Lavapiés. A young woman all in white points at the meadow at the bottom of the slope. There the crowd swarms, made small by distance. Barouches, carriages, and tents stand there. A light-colored greyhound runs among the people. The multitude rides horseback, plays circle games, flirts, and converses in groups. Even farther away, the Manzanares flows by, silvered by the metallic light of an indecisive spring. Across the river is the view of Madrid, with the walls of the Royal Palace and the rounded dome of San Francisco el Grande.

  The Hermitage of San Isidro would not be transferred to a cartoon or to embroidered silk. It remained a sketch, like The Meadow, and both are approaches to a common theme, each with a different focus. The light is the same beneath a sky covered with gray and bluish clouds. Finally, in the background, as Goya would have said, one sees the temple with the double dome, the watchtower, the spire topped by the cross, and the three belfries of the campanile. In front of that are the majos and majas, the lower-class men and women grouped together and enjoying the miraculous water of the fountain. More men and women crowd together at the portico of the church. The young men are muffled in their capes, because this May is still uncertain, as we used to say. Still, in the foreground, an adolescent girl wrapped in a white shawl uses her fan as she talks with a friend. For Antonio de Onieva, the blues, grays, oranges, yellows, and greens of this sketch anticipate and recall Camille Corot in his best moments. At the Osuna auction it sold for three thousand pesetas. The Meadow of San Isidro, on the other hand, was purchased for fifteen thousand.