The Valley of the Fallen

by Carlos Rojas

  In Blind Man’s Bluff it never grows dark because the artist has stopped time and the sky is made of paper. But in the gardens of El Capricho, where Pepe-Hillo and Costillares push the duchess of Osuna in a swing, night begins to fall slowly on the pools and acacias. Very soon, when it is dark, all the personages in this long masquerade ball will be as blind as the false majo who probes the air with his wooden spoon. Then, in the endless shadows that still envelop the country now, the eyes of Goya’s monsters will begin to light up in his own Caprices: that labyrinth made to the measure of our recent, eternal history, where everything will always be the same, with reason or without it, because men don’t know the way.

  April 1, 1828

  “Dear Xavier: It is impossible for me to tell you anything except that I’m a little shaken with so much joy and had to go to bed. God willing, I’ll see you and welcome you when you arrive, and with that my happiness would be complete.” I signed my name at the bottom and Marianito added a note of his own: “Dear papa: My grandfather sends you these lines and some other letters too so you can see that he’s still alive.” The truth is that life, what we call life, I’m not living with much pleasure these days. The day before yesterday my daughter-in-law and Marianito arrived to tell me right away that Xavier would come for them in a couple of weeks. So happy a hope, knowing they would all be together and with me made me crazy with happiness and then made me sick. I spent hours talking to them endlessly like an old parrot, and they didn’t seem to grow tired of my chatter. My daughter-in-law, who’s a good woman but reticent, like all the Goicoecheas, who are more Basque than Madrilenian, only smiled at me from time to time, shaking her head with an affectionate gesture. Marianito, on the other hand, turned out identical to me. He hasn’t inherited anything of the Goicoecheas, or the Bayeus, from his grandmother, my dead Josefa. He’s the way I was at his age, which now must be seventeen or eighteen years old. He turned out good-looking and strong, with a courage that suits his nature like a ring suits a finger. Passionate and disorderly, he’s as violent as he is affectionate. At times he interrupted my talkativeness, hugging me and kissing my cheeks to celebrate some witticism or amusing recollection of mine. Women will fight over him, if they haven’t started to already. And I’m afraid he’ll keep men in their place with a sword or a knife, in too many duels and fights, as I had to do. It seems as inevitable as it is significant that he uses the formal Usted with his father, but tú with me. All these things and so many others I’d like to talk over with Xavier when he arrives in Bordeaux. God willing this trip of his that they tell me will be in two weeks isn’t delayed again, and that I don’t go out like a candle first. Moratín once told me that he had always tried to avoid happiness, because joy is more treacherous than sorrow. I’d prefer not to believe it, but I thought of Moratín this afternoon when I felt out of sorts and sick after lunch. Until then, and since the arrival of my dear travelers, my good fortune was as great as my good spirits. Now, under these blankets, I’ve remembered again that I’m eighty-two years old, and that at my age, my greatest joy, as I once told His Majesty the king, would be to die before Xavier and naturally before Marianito. Yes, I would like to speak to my son about these and so many other things when he comes to Bordeaux. In Xavier, unlike Marianito, my blood and the blood of the Bayeus are mixed in equal parts. Occasionally, like me, he flies into a rage and then, like a gale, he blows away everything in front of him. Yet most of the time he knows how to be prudent and astute, like his mother. In this particular we are very different, because when I attempt to act with prudence, I fall into cowardice and unworthiness. (The same thing will happen to Marianito if God doesn’t protect him.) With his tact and moderation, Xavier would now smooth over Leocadia’s asperities, which I do not even wish to think about. As soon as Marianito and my daughter-in-law arrived, she hid Rosarito I don’t know where, as if she feared the contagion of leprosy. Then she, Leocadia, began to behave like a respectful servant, but distant and gruff. “At the señora’s orders. Whatever the señora prefers will be cooked,” I read on her lips when she addressed my daughter-in-law, who made an effort to overcome her own coldness in her dealing with that basilisk. At other times her irony cut like a knife at a carving table. “Does the young gentleman want his chocolate and croissants served in bed or does he prefer to have breakfast with the others?” she would say to Mariano. The night before last when we went to bed, I begged her to moderate her manner so she would not lessen my joy with her behavior. As if I had rubbed salt into her wounds, she transformed into a fury and beside herself with rage, began to berate me. She leaned on the pillows with one arm and in the other she held a lit lamp up to her face so I wouldn’t miss a word on her lips. “You’re so blind you can’t even see your own stupidity! You old goat! Don’t you understand that they came only to make certain you hadn’t changed your will? They don’t give a damn about your blood, your name, your life, if they’re certain they’ll inherit your money, your house, and your paintings. If they could count on all that now, they’d leave you to rot in exile without even a sideways glance. They don’t care whether you’re devoured by solitude or worms, because all they want from you is the inheritance. I can’t reproach them for that either, because if they lived a thousand years they’d never understand you. They may be people with your name and of your flesh; but they’ll never, never really know who you were in the world.” In her fury she stumbled over her words, and I thought she was going to smash the lamp into my temple. “They aren’t bastards because they’re egoists, they’re egoists because they’re bastards!” she went on as soon as she had caught her breath. “Your son Xavier is even worse than your daughter-in-law the vixen or your grandson the ne’er-do-well! Even worse because he’s more of a hypocrite and less of a simpleton than that pair of clowns. Now he waits in the shadows for news from his spies. If they wrote to him that you had died, he’d race here at breakneck speed to take over everything down to the last handkerchief. Then he’d sell your paintings one by one to buy feed for his mules or bonds in the Bank of San Francisco!” I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t hear her and soon, her head fallen back on the pillow, she entered my sleep. (“It’s almost seven years now that my mother passed in Rome and ten days later my father followed her to hell from Naples. Only then and for the first time in my life did I feel free. Then I told myself no, to really be free it would have been necessary for them not to have engendered me. Only those who never were are free, because even the dead serve their sentence. All the rest, including the crown, is a line in the water, the intrigues of pastry chefs.”) In a dining room even vaster than the one in Venta del Aire, with almost all its tables empty, a man and woman were eating lunch. I thought I could imagine his voice, which was the same as mine in other dreams; but the couple was enclosed in silence. My last portrait of His Majesty the king, wrapped in his ermine and holding the scepter, was hanging on the wall. (“On the day my mother died, my sister María Luisa wrote to me from Rome. My mother had died almost in Godoy’s arms, so to speak. For an entire week he sat with her in her agony at all hours of the day or night, the two of them alone in that room. The night before her passing, my mother called for María Luisa and said to her: I’m going to die. I recommend Manuel to you. You can be sure that you and your brother Fernando will not find a more affectionate person. When my sister saw that the thing was going badly she moved the sausage-maker away from her side—he was crying like a penitent Magdalene—and called for the priests.”) The woman was sitting now on a fallen trunk at the edge of some pastures. She wore a knitted garment similar to the sheepskin jackets of shepherds from León, and long, narrow breeches, like the ones toreros wear when testing the bulls. That man whose voice was identical to mine, or to the memory I had of my voice in my disability, remained standing at her side. She had taken his hand between hers and spoke to him in words I could not make out in the dream, her expression absorbed and intense, lit by a wintry sun. On the snow in the meadow the figures from my last tapestry cartoon were playing
blind man’s bluff. They played, danced, and laughed in outbursts that were silent in my deafness. Looking at the couple, I read two questions on the woman’s lips: “Do you know who you are? Do you really know who we are?” “Blind Man’s Bluff tells you who we will be,” her companion replied. I conceived of that cartoon in El Capricho, after a hateful dispute with the Royal Factory. I did not want to paint others but agreed to give them a final painting that recapitulated four of my sketches of the San Isidro fiestas. The games in the forests of the dukes of Osuna gave me the theme. I left out the hermitage and the miraculous fountain, which seemed too obvious to me then. I also rejected any reference to the view of Madrid in the distance. To replace it I invented a landscape, between the tapestry and the dream, as Velázquez would do. I dressed an aristocratic dandy as a flashy majo, put a blindfold over his eyes, a long wooden spoon in his hand, and left him in the center of the canvas. Then around him I painted four pairs of foppish men and overdressed women, like him in costume, holding hands and dancing in a circle. The cartoon was a success and at the Royal Factory they flattered me and begged me to provide them with others at my convenience. In secret they offered me fees for future canvases that Francisco Bayeu, the oldest of my brothers-in-law, would never charge. I absolutely refused. That period in my life, when I painted tapestries for Santa Bárbara, had ended. Artificially prolonging it would have been as absurd as insisting on delaying dawn until midday, or holding back the wake of a ship at sea. What I could only sense then and did not understand until many years later was that an entire century, the one in which it was our fate to be born, gain the use of our reason, and conceive our children, was ending along with that part of my career. I remember very well the festival of San Isidro in the year I painted Blind Man’s Bluff, sometime in 1787 or 1788. It was the duchess of Osuna’s idea that we should all go on an excursion to the hermitage that March. “Only by associating in this way with the common people, even if only once a year, shall we understand the meaning of our time on earth,” said the duchess. I wondered whether she had forgotten where people like Costillares, Pepe-Hillo, and I myself came from, the first two brought up among the tripe sellers and swindlers in the slaughterhouse in Sevilla, and the other the son of an Aragonese metal worker and gilder. The truth is I had forgotten that, and not because people thought we were her lovers but because both she and the duke called us their friends. In the eyes of the Osunas, that name was worth more than the blood of the king. In various carriages and barouches we went from El Capricho to San Isidro, crossing Madrid. “The morning is so clear it looks as if it had come from one of your paintings,” the duchess said to me. “Perhaps it did,” I replied, and the two of us began to laugh. My deafness would not come for another few years, and hearing my own laughter and the laughter of women wasn’t limited to dreams, as it is now. Through the arch erected by His Majesty King Don Carlos III, who would die that same year, we came into Calle de Alcalá. We passed in front of the Convents of the Bernardas, the Calatravas, and the Baronesses. In the early morning the bells of San José rang for Mass, as did the bells of the Chapel of Santa Teresa, where, the duke told me, the body of Don Rodrigo Calderón lay in state after climbing to the gallows with his proverbial arrogance. “One day a monarch’s favorite, the next day condemned as an embezzler. They say that when Felipe III died, Don Rodrigo Calderón, marquis de Siete Iglesias, exclaimed: ‘The king has died, I am a dead man too!’” remarked the duke of Osuna. “He climbed to the scaffold in mourning, a gentleman on a mule with a large escort of constables, town criers, bailiffs, and other persons of the law. Along the streets and roads to the Plaza Mayor, where they were going to hang him, he flirted with the girls as if it were all a carnival. At that time, thieves didn’t live as well as they do now, but they died with great dignity.” Near the orchard of the Convent of San José and within the boundaries of the Plazuela del Almirante, lived a still unknown soldier from Extremadura named Manuel Godoy. At the corner of the Prado de San Jerónimo and Calle de Alcalá, María Teresa, still very young, was building the Palacio de Buenavista. Neither she nor her husband, the marquis de Villafranca, would ever live in it or even see it finished. At the death of María Teresa and with the looting of its contents, they would give that building to the same Extremaduran officer, now called the duke of Alcudia and the Prince of Peace. A mocking justice, I don’t know whether from heaven or hell, would also have the entire fortune of the prince plundered after his fall into disgrace. (“I’m going to tell you something that nobody else knows. My mother left her entire personal fortune to her lover, the sausage-maker. Naturally I never allowed Godoy to see a penny of it. He’ll end his days in Paris, rotting away in poverty, I assure you.”) Beside the hermitage we drank the water of the miraculous spring. I still remember very well that it tasted of hoarfrost and sierra winds. The duchess made some almost blasphemous jokes about the wonders of the fountain. Pepe-Hillo and Costillares, however, drank in a very reserved way, their eyes closed as if they were praying in silence, begging the saint for a respite in the bullfights. “Each period had its Golden Age, which was the age of wonders,” remarked the duchess of Osuna. “In pagan times it was the age when animals spoke and propounded riddles. In Christianity it was the age of miracles. Even the demon had recourse to his magic and witches’ sabbaths, when incubuses fathered children on the virgins of the very Catholic Biscay. Now reason is the only ambit of the extraordinary.” “Don’t forget liberty, my dear,” the duke said with a smile. “We believe in it as we do in all-powerful reason, although I don’t know if for exactly the same motives.” The poet Iriarte inhaled a pinch of snuff and stretched out beside the tablecloths in the meadow. “Perhaps miracles are still happening even though we are too blind to notice them. This disregard of portentous omens seems typical of empires in their death agony. Think of Julius Caesar ignoring the omens of his death before he went to the Senate.” “The analogy is invalid, my good Iriarte, because we can hardly compare our new monarch to Caesar, much less the Roman Senate to the Council of Castilla,” replied the duke. “Exactly, Iriarte, don’t be sacrilegious,” the duchess interjected. “I never believed in the divine right of kings, only of emperors, and of course, dukes. Nonetheless, it must be admitted that Julius Caesar, although the emperor, was a fairy.” Everyone laughed, including the toreros who barely understood everything they were attempting to discuss. “I wasn’t referring to His Majesty or to the Council of Castilla,” Iriarte said with a smile, “but to serious, decent people, like us. Miracles are everywhere, and we don’t know how to see them. Changing water into wine is no small wonder; but our survival in the painting of this man”—he pointed at me with a lazy gesture—“perhaps centuries after our death, seems equally marvelous to me. The greatest portent does not consist of transforming the present but anticipating its future changes. In this way our ashes will become our portraits, just as paint from a palette turns a canvas into a mirror.” “Ah, Iriarte, what you’re telling us is so beautiful!” applauded the duchess. “You ought to put it in a farce and call it The Fountain of San Isidro. We would put it on in the little theater at El Capricho and we would play ourselves, just as we’re living it now. In the end it could turn out that we were all part of a tapestry or the memory of our painter in his old age.” Iriarte smiled, shaking his head. “The project surpasses my skill, Señora. One would need a biographer of great artists, like Vasari, to write it.” Someone asked who Vasari was and Iriarte spoke of Le Vite de’più Eccelenti Pittori, Scultori e Architetti. I was pleased that the subject had changed, because I didn’t know whether Iriarte was mocking me or being sincere in his extravagant praise. Possibly both at the same time. The light was leaving like a breath of wind. Like the day. Like our lives. Thirty or thirty-five years later, on my first excursion following the war, I went back to the fountain of San Isidro. By then everyone present at the outing had died except the duchess of Osuna and me, although the two of us would not see each other again either. The night before, I had been called to the p
alace, where His Majesty, who had returned from Valençay a few days earlier, was asking for me. He had liked The Second of May, 1808, in Madrid: The Battle with the Mamelukes, and The Third of May, 1808, in Madrid: The Shootings on Príncipe Pío Hill, displayed on the triumphal arch at the Puerta de Alcalá. Like all of his family, he had an instinctive sense of justice toward painting that he could never apply to other people or to himself. He was absolutely right when he praised the painting of the executions more than the other canvas. According to what I was told afterward, he had ordered his carriage stopped in front of those canvases and then stepped out, to the amazement of the crowd, to look at them carefully. “The old bastard saved his skin! There was never another like him!” those who were closest heard him murmur. Then, shaking his head and smiling his hyena’s smile, he returned to the carriage. In the palace that morning he did not mention my dealings with the invaders and the French king. I knew him too well and knew his attitude was due not to deference but to his plan to keep me in doubt regarding possible legal proceedings for acts of treason against the crown. The truth was I didn’t care very much what he did to me, because after painting The Shootings on Príncipe Pío Hill, I had lost my fear of death. In fact, I could have fled with the other Frenchified Spaniards and did not, although I did not want to remind him of it then. The audience was brief, reduced to a monologue by the king. He made various references to my painting and to art in general, all of them certainly very sensible; he spoke of creating a museum for the nation with the royal collections, and finally he said that the following day, San Isidro, I was to accompany him to the hermitage and the miraculous fountain, where the crowd was going to pay homage to him. “It will be a fiesta unlike any other: a celebration of the peace of the Desired One,” he specified with his pale smile. “I should like you to make notes for a possible future painting.” The next morning I was obliged to share the royal carriage with him. He greeted me with a wink and an elbow in my ribs. His breath smelled of boiled eggs and tobacco. “It’s necessary to recognize that in a certain sense, we are indebted to your friends the French. I confess that to you with no misgivings, if you promise to keep my secret.” For the first time he was making a reference, however oblique, to my dealings with King José and his people. I deciphered the words on his lips perfectly but did not reply and did not want to understand. On the other hand, he did not seem to expect my excuses or protests, for he continued speaking: “The Intruder abolished the gallows and introduced the base garrote, which indicates irrevocable progress in our juridical customs. Anybody can learn to hang in an instant, and I myself hanged one of my mother’s poodles when I was a boy as a kind of revenge for some punishment or other. As you’ll recall, I was extremely clever as a boy. It was a shame I didn’t follow my natural bent and hang the sausage-maker from the same tree. Don’t you agree?” I think I said to him then that I had seen too many crimes during the war to desire that kind of death for anyone. He burst into cackling laughter. “Don’t be a hypocrite, old man! The talent the devil gave you excuses all your faults except duplicity. You are the first hangman in the kingdom because in days gone by you tightened the noose around our necks when you painted me together with my family. In each painting you executed us in the most offhand way. I don’t reproach you for it, for you were stronger and subjected us to your law.” I said I hadn’t dominated anyone but only painted what I saw. He nodded with a shrug. “We’ve both said the same thing, because you saw us as we were, inside and out. And you obliged us to assume our total truth. It was too bad that with time you too weakened, because since then I no longer believe in anyone except myself. The problem is that in reality I don’t exist. I’m only a madman who imagines he’s the Desired One. Tell me, old man, do you believe in God as you do in your king?” I pretended to ignore the question and he continued, now without looking at me; legs spread, slumped in his seat, eyes fixed on the roof of the carriage. “I believe in the garrote. It is the inevitable result of the natural harmony of the past century. If we are discreetly prodigal with it in these early days of peace, it can turn this madhouse into an arcadia. I’m counting on a people who owe me everything after five years of killing in my name. Now they will offer me their submission in exchange for order.” As we approached the hermitage, the crowds outside increased. His Majesty the king personally opened the carriage’s tasseled curtains, which had been closed until then. On the slopes of San Isidro, the troops struggled to contain the mob that cheered the monarch as it tried to invade his carriage. The sovereign smiled and waved to the right and left, bending in obsequious bows. I thought I had descended to the final chasm of hell, a hell achieved with peace, whose accurate measure not even war itself could give us. A human tide of beggars, lepers, the blind, the mutilated, the starving came with their hunger, their nakedness, and their families from lands burned by the conflict to go on an excursion to the miraculous fountain to taste the water and offer their vassalage to the king. By express order of the palace, as I learned later, the soldiers had managed the crowd with brandy made of grape skins, and the bellowing of the besotted multitudes deafened the heavens. They shouted their hurrahs for the Desired One, the Holy Inquisition, for prisons and chains. The monarch took care to tell me about it so that not even in my deafness could I be free of their roars. A stink of gangrene, sweat, and wine penetrated the carriage, to the delight of Don Fernando. “It reeks of our noble people, old man! Enjoy the trail of their flesh, since you can’t manage to hear their voices. They smell like us, since they were created in our image or in God’s! In any of the apparently civilized countries, like the France of your friends, this mob would have a revolution and decapitate you and me. Perhaps you first, because you came out of the same soil and the same street where they still suffer. In Valençay the Corsican once repeated to me a phrase by some Jacobin or other. With complete reason that man said that no king is born unpardonable. It must be even more unpardonable to be born an artist like you. For beings of your stripe, the ones we count on one hand in history, there is no mercy and no place on earth, although we kings sometimes allow you to paint us as we are. When death makes you inoffensive, you will be remembered as a witness to our scandals and locked in the invisible cages that the future reserves for monsters.” He opened the windows, and that sea of stinking, clamoring flesh threw itself at the openings to kiss the hands of the Desired One. He, laughing, offered them to the throng with its bulging eyes and open maws; the horror multiplied my silence. He guffawed and allowed them to lick his palms, suck his fingers, bite his knuckles, and fight over who would repeatedly kiss his nails. Suddenly, in one of his unpredictable tempers, he grew bored and knocked on the roof of the carriage with the handle of his walking stick. As if it were an agreed-upon signal, the coachmen attacked the mob with their whips while the guards in the escort dispersed them by firing into the air. His Majesty the king wiped his hands with a handkerchief scented with two commingled perfumes, eucalyptus and patchouli. Then he tossed it out the window with a gesture of disgust and lit a cigar. “With a nation like this, the keys of the kingdom are well protected. Neither you nor I have anything to fear. Any authentic revolution will always be impossible in a land like ours. With the help of the garrote we shall live in peace, and the executioner will be our guardian angel. It is a consolation to know that this court of miracles adores me, because when they are primed to kill, they are more savage than anyone, as our invaders could confirm. They are equally good as killers and as lackeys. If they were to take over our cities and our weapons, we would have to shoot them for years on end to get them back on the path. In the meantime, I shall establish the art museum where they’ll show the family portrait you made of us. The day will come when people won’t recognize us standing there in a group because they’ve forgotten my name and the names of my family. Yours, on the other hand, they’ll remember forever, or, at least, that is what I expect.” Halfway down the slope, that starving mob, drunk on dregs, was left behind. I stared at them, absorbed, while the carriage d
rove away from the crowd on the road to the hermitage. After the whip lashes and the blows from rifle butts, they huddled together like a flock recently corralled by dogs. Slowly, dragging their feet, which were bare or wrapped in rags, they continued their pilgrimage to the temple and the spring. They were led by a blind man with large blank eyes and a head twisted like that of a partially decapitated puppet. Playing the guitar, he must have been singing at the top of his lungs to judge by how wide he opened his mouth. The others seemed to be singing with him. Suddenly a May storm threatened and the sky grew dark in the middle of the morning. Now it was like old blackened silver that reverberated intermittently. Soon the first lightning flashes would cross the sky near San Antonio de la Florida. I won’t say that for a long time I had carried with me the memory of excursions. Expressing it this way would not reflect reality. Memory stores in its attics too many lost images that we evoke only now and then. I would sooner believe that the horde of beggars, blind men, lepers, and cripples, blown about by the disasters of war and gathered together on that San Isidro Day by their faith in the fountain and in the Desired One, followed me beyond the hermitage, going deep inside me, as if at the center of my being, where deafness muffled their bellowing, they would find the end of their exodus. Five or six years later, when I bought the Quinta del Sordo, I painted them on a wall, determined to exorcize them, as I had done earlier when I painted Saturn devouring his child. (“Recounting the story of this Spain of ours is equivalent to confessing one’s secret crimes.”) Perhaps it is true, because this country has been devouring itself for so long now that it has the cruelty of the deformed. In any case, the farm and its paintings will soon be Xavier’s, in spite of Leocadia. (“. . . They couldn’t care less about your blood, your name, even your life, if they’re sure of inheriting your money, your house, and your paintings. If they could count on all of it now, they’d leave you to rot in exile without ever seeing you again. They don’t care at all if you’re devoured by solitude or worms, because all they want from you is the inheritance . . .”) I had told His Majesty the king that my ideal of happiness was to die before my son. Now this doesn’t seem completely true. My concept of happiness is increasingly ambitious. To fulfill it I would need Xavier to come to Bordeaux before my death. To see him again, even if it were only for an instant, perhaps as recompense for the torture of not having heard his voice since he was a very little boy. In fact, I’m deceiving myself again, because if Xavier were to come right away, as the daughter-in-law and Marianito say he will, then the greatest blessing would be not to die. Better to forget about living or, for that matter, about death! Better to resign myself to waiting for the arrival of my son tomorrow morning, at the latest. (“. . . Now he’s waiting in the shadows for news from his spies. If they wrote to him that you had died, he would race here to take possession of everything, down to the last handkerchief. Then he would sell your paintings one by one to buy feed for his mules or bonds from the Bank of San Francisco!”) Why would I care how much money Xavier makes with my paintings when I’m dead? I didn’t paint them for my family to hide away, as if they were the relics of a saint. What do I care what Xavier or Marianito think of their name, which is my name? I have been friend to four kings and the last one, the Desired One, told me with absolute accuracy that neither he nor I was anybody. At best, we weren’t worth more or less than the beggars on their excursion, because in the bloody farce of our country, we all share the same sentence. No, I didn’t paint my paintings so my family would venerate them, and I didn’t choose my name so they would revere it. My name and my painting were imposed on me by unknown forces much greater than my will. I always painted to know I was alive, and I wanted to believe that in eternity I would go on painting, because otherwise, it wouldn’t have been worth living. (“I had the hope that you would die here, of old age, in order to give you funeral rites worthy of Apelles. I would have displayed your body at the Puerta de Alcalá, watched over by the Royal Halberdiers and a troop of cavalry. In single file and all the way to the Ventas del Espíritu Santo, the people would have waited nights on end to see you dead. The mob comes to executions as well as funerals. It’s all part of the same circus.”) Thank God they will never show my remains to public curiosity. Very soon they’ll be in the cemetery of the Grande Chartreuse, here in Bordeaux. Still, I have the hope that this French earth will not be their final resting place. I’d be very happy if they were taken the next day to Madrid. Not to display them to the people but to bury them in San Antonio de la Florida. The truth is I don’t know the reason for this desire of mine; perhaps it is due to reasons of perspective and symmetry. In San Antonio de la Florida, and for the first time in my life, I painted as I pleased without anyone daring to reproach me for it. In other words, there I began to be who I am, although until then I wouldn’t have dared to pay attention to myself. And so it would be just that when those frescoes survive me, it will be their task to watch over my bones at the Greek Cross intersect in the floor plan of the hermitage, at the foot of the main altar, beneath the lamp. I said frescoes, and the truth is they aren’t frescoes and never were but rather an invention of mine inspired by old Palomino’s book and carried out with a mixture of fresco and tempera. With a pound and three-quarters of fine washed sponges, soaked in color, I smoothed the tonalities of the background. Then I prepared the fresco and let it set with the plaster. Afterward I put in the dark masses and waited until everything dried. Finally, and after so much preparation, I began to design the details around the edges of the masses. In this way I achieved a double purpose: to keep the blue, green, and gray backgrounds that an authentic fresco would have given me, and to free myself from the pressures imposed by this kind of painting, when the muralist applies the colors before the plaster dries. I liked the proposed subject, because it almost resembled one of my Caprices in the divine mode, and I was working then on that series of engravings. A young Portuguese monk heard the news in Italy that his father, Martín Bulloes, had been falsely accused of murder in Lisbon. Flying through the air, he appeared in Portugal and resuscitated the victim of the crime for a moment so that he could reveal the name of his killer. The young monk was Saint Anthony of Padua, and this was the most celebrated of his miracles. The first saint’s festival / that God ever sent us / is the feast of San Antonio / de la Florida. I was over fifty then, already deaf forever, and had broken with the only woman I ever really loved in this world. And yet I received the royal commission to decorate the hermitage with the eagerness of a boy selling his first painting. Around the dome I painted a circular balcony and behind its railing more than one hundred figures, witnesses to the miracle. San Antonio performed his resurrection in medieval Lisbon, but I transferred it to the streets of the Madrid of my day. Iriarte had said that marvels abounded all around us but we did not know how to read them. After so many years, that reflection inspired me to paint a crowd, pressed together in the dome and watching the miracle with the cold curiosity they would bring to the abilities of an acrobat. As the dead man rose uncertainly from his coffin, a trio of young girls chattered, their backs to him. A boy looked at them and smiled. A blonde, somewhere between a prostitute and a know-it-all, tried to tempt him with her bared bosom. Two half-naked sick men prayed piously at the feet of the saint. A pair of small, mischievous boys climbed up to the railing so as not to miss the smallest detail of the performance. The men crowded together in groups, commenting on other matters or flirting with the women. Wet nurses, midwives, and gossips whispered among the women or flirted with the young men. The radiant symbol of divinity appeared escorted by celestial choirs in lunettes, intrados, and pendentives. The angels were very young women, carnal and exciting in their very simplicity. Naked amoretti played the part of cherubs. I painted the world I saw in the market, at bullfights, at fairs, on excursions. A country of workers’ mothers and wives, of maidens and duennas, of servant girls, bawds, actresses, dressmakers, market women, nursemaids, procuresses, chambermaids, fishwives, barmaids, amusing women. A country of so
ldiers, students, winter bullfighters, constables, notaries, servants at inns, porters, sacristans, bricklayers, farm laborers, the jobless, swindlers, pimps, carnival workers. At the top of the scaffold, my assistant Asensio Juliá shook his head sadly. “When all this is made public, the Holy Inquisition will take us out of here in irons,” he would say to me every so often. One afternoon, María Teresa appeared at San Antonio de la Florida. By then we had reestablished our relationship, former lovers turned into more or less indecent friends. Asensio Juliá and I were on the highest planks, and from that distance I saw her laugh without being able to make out the words on her lips. And my assistant dropped his rag, as if María Teresa’s exclamations from the floor were the most indecent things he had ever heard. In a fury I climbed down from the framework and confronted her, kicking away the cloths that covered the floor tiles. “If you don’t mind, what the hell are you doing here? I’ve told you a thousand times not to come and interrupt the work. If you wanted to talk to me, you could have sent a note with one of your servants.” She, in turn, asked me, still laughing, what the hell all the whores in Madrid were doing divided between heavenly glory and the balcony of a church. I replied angrily that I hadn’t painted any brothel but common humanity, just as we saw it on the street and in the theater. “Don’t try to explain it to me! The frescoes are beautiful! If the Escorial is our Saint Peter’s, it would be fair for San Antonio de la Florida to be our Sistine Chapel.” “These aren’t frescoes, strictly speaking.” “Whatever they are, they’ll bring you a lot of headaches. Don’t say afterward I didn’t warn you!” “Asensio’s afraid we’ll leave here in the chains of the Holy Office when they open the hermitage for worship. I don’t think so.” “I don’t either, because after all, we’re on the verge of the nineteenth century. But they may force you to scrape away the entire work. The king and queen will be the first to become indignant.” That year, on the Day of the Virgin, my murals were shown to the royal family. Everyone, the people from the church and the court, praised their originality. On saints’ days people would fill the hermitage each morning to see themselves in the dome. María Teresa sent me a message with a servant: “My congratulations! I’m beginning to wonder whether we don’t really live in your paintings and the entire country isn’t a ruse and a fantasy of yours.” (“Spain? Spain doesn’t exist. It’s one of my Absurdities set up ages ago.”) In any case, I have the firm though irrational conviction that San Antonio de la Florida will be my final resting place. At times, almost with the same clarity as if I had painted it, I imagine the burial of my bones in that chapel. Gentlemen in frock coats, holding their top hats, listen to an old man with a flowing beard who reads three pages where my name is mentioned very frequently. No one applauds when he finishes reading, but they all nod their agreement. Then some workmen covered in long smocks, like rustics in the Toledan countryside, lower a lead coffin into an open grave directly beneath the eye of the lantern. Then they cover the opening with a large gravestone that has my last name between two dates. On top of that they place a wreath of autumn roses with a gold ribbon twisting through it: a pious tribute, as they call it, from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, of which I had been a regular member and even the president. When night falls they all leave, and the winter stars begin to burn above the lantern. Only the moon and the chancel lamp light the chapel, where a play of mirrors in the corners multiplies my paintings and the shadows. Suddenly, with no lifting of latches or pushing of doors on their hinges, the four couples of Blind Man’s Bluff cross the walls and, holding hands, close a circle around my grave. In the half-light the measured blows of a spoon against the wall begin to sound. Outside, the flute of some shepherd picks up and maintains the rhythm. Then they share and speed up the rhythm, as if the two of them were joining the only sounds in a universe plunged into the silence of deafness or the quietude of chasms in a sea not yet discovered. To the rhythm of the flute and the spoon, the figures in Blind Man’s Bluff are now dancing around my grave. They skip, laugh, and become filled with longing as they dance, while echoes of voices and laughter in the mirrors and corners of the naves become animated. Up above, in the dome, the pendentives, intrados, and lunettes, the people of the miracle peer over the railing to look at them, between the female gathering of angels and the flight, suddenly halted, of a swarm of naked amoretti.