The Valley of the Fallen

by Carlos Rojas

  He reread the conclusion of his notes on the cartoons for tapestries on which he had worked all night, and put out the table lamp. Outside, morning turned the icy needles of a pine tree pink. A short while before, when dawn was just breaking, he heard Marina get up. Without exchanging a single word with Sandro, wrapped in an old gray coat, she crossed in front of the misted window after closing the door with a single dry bang. Then he heard her trying to start the cold, recalcitrant engine of the Simca in order to drive away, shifting gears, along the broad snow-covered path that disappeared into the woods.

  He turned on the gas stove and poured a cup of boiling coffee. Only then, as he thought about the Fight with Cudgels and the other black paintings at the Quinta del Sordo, did he notice the radio lost among the books. The medical reports of the night before were summarized and confirmed that morning with no major changes. At 15:30 hours yesterday, His Excellency the Generalissimo presented an acute situation with arterial hypotension, an increase in venous pressure, and abdominal distension, agreeing with a critical abdominal diagnosis caused by a probable deficiency in suturing, in virtue of the local and general circumstances present in the disease. Having decided on an immediate intervention, it was carried out in the operating theater of “La Paz” Hospital Complex by Professor Manuel Hidalgo Huerta, with the collaboration of Doctors Artero, Alonso Castrillo, and Cabrero. The anesthesiology and recovery team was composed of Doctors Llauradó and Francisco Fernández Juste. Cardiological control was carried out by Doctors Vital Aza, Señor de Uría, Minguez y Palma, in the presence of the usual medical team. The surgical intervention confirmed a crescent dehiscence related to the aspect of shock described previously, at the level of gastro-jejunal anastomosis of reduced diameter, with the emergence of the intestinal contents into the peritoneal cavity. With the dehiscent zone newly sutured, drains were placed in the abdominal cavity and jejunal loop. The intervention lasted two hours and was satisfactorily tolerated. When it was over the prognosis was extremely grave.

  José Luis Pérez Olmedo, Madrilenian, married with three children, a technical specialist in the installation of air conditioning, twenty-six years old, an Apostolic Catholic and probably a fan of the Rayo Vallecano soccer team, appeared at the door of “La Paz” to donate one of his kidneys to Franco. “My wife’s a little frightened, but she understands. We Spaniards owe everything to this man who’s suffering so much inside.” They took down his information and the nature of the offer, while the media saved his image for posterity. Then the man went to work. A woman from Cuatro Caminos came to the clinic “to offer something that perhaps will help the miracle.” Wrapped in a perfumed handkerchief she had a gold medal of the Virgin del Carmen; another of Our Lady of Lourdes; a ring with a ruby mounted in small diamonds; and a paper Spanish flag. She said that over the years and generations, these articles, kept in a reliquary, had worked many wonders in her house. Gerardo González Serrano, a gardener at the Pardo for three decades and now eighty-six years old and an invalid, was driven each morning to the doors of “La Paz” to follow the latest news up close. Anselmo Paulino Álvarez, ambassador of the Dominican Republic in Madrid, declared to the press that “the Generalissimo is the greatest chief of state left in Europe. After the last operation they are telling us that Franco has improved. The impressions are favorable and we are very pleased. I have been a personal friend of his for twenty years.” Salvador Tébar Jiménez, a stevedore from Cartagena, traversed eight kilometers, the distance between “La Paz” and the Puerta del Sol, with fifty kilos of cement on his back. “I wanted to keep this promise, in gratitude to Franco,” he said.

  At 23:30 hours on the previous day the evolution of the illness of His Excellency the Head of State, hospitalized in the Social Welfare Hospital Complex of “La Paz,” was the following: the Generalissimo’s condition of endotoxic shock could be surmounted during the surgical intervention. The postoperative evolution in the first five hours was satisfactory, with arterial and venous tensions, and cardiac rhythm and frequency within acceptable limits. The pulmonary situation did not deteriorate either. The prognosis continued being extremely grave. The hospital was watched over by Franco’s own bodyguards and a reserve company of the armed police composed of fifty-six members, two sergeants, and a lieutenant. Three companies relieved one another every eight hours, protecting the dying man from sunup to sundown. A group of Cuban exiles sent the Caudillo a bouquet of roses. Through the Subsecretariat of the Ministry of the Interior, the private residence of the Generalissimo received a letter, signed by Lorenzo Valverde Ruiz, where in the name of the wounded veterans of the Republic (who were always denied pensions) he expressed best wishes for a rapid recovery. The government was also congratulated in that note for its efficiency and calm. The child María Ángeles Lazcano López, hospitalized in the “Francisco Franco” clinic in July of the previous year at the same time as the Caudillo, in his penultimate illness, now brought him a bouquet of flowers with a note written in India ink and in colors, expressing her desires for an immediate recovery. Another little girl, Paloma Trujillano, sent a rose to the patient each day, accompanied by a card that said: “I keep praying.” A priest from Alcalá de Henares sent a medal of the Virgin of Alcalá, and an old woman from Jaén offered another medal, along with an image of the Virgin de Tiscar, “because they are from lands often honored by the presence of the Generalissimo.”

  Today, November 15, at 9:00 a.m., postoperative progress continues with arterial and venous pressure constant, and rhythm and frequency of the pulse within acceptable limits. The pulmonary situation remains stable, with respiration assisted according to the usual techniques of postoperative recovery. The session of hemodialysis was well tolerated and efficacious. The prognosis continues to be extremely grave. The man dying in Madrid had promised to carry Spain to the heights or leave the country feet first. Now he was dying irremediably beneath the cloak of the Virgin del Pilar and guarded by the chaste arm of Saint Teresa, as well as by the medals of the Virgins of Tiscar, Alcalá de Henares, Carmen, and Lourdes. The economic, intellectual, and moral greatness of his country was rather less evident and much more arguable. As Raymond Carr once told Sandro, the victor in the civil war proclaimed that he had destroyed the Spanish nineteenth century. In other words, the liberal tradition that filled almost a century and a half of history, in spite of so many armed interruptions and its own errors, falsehoods, political bosses, and limitations of every kind. “As the earlier prophets of the iron surgeon saw it,” Carr continued, “the marginal cost of authoritarianism is, however, very high and it isn’t as easy to cross the Rubicon a second time as it was before the first.”

  Sandro had shown himself to be partially in agreement with the English historian. From his own point of view, Francoism was not the final and most prolonged response of the iron surgeons to the liberal tradition, but the inevitable result of its own disaster. “In Spain, so far,” he had replied, “everything has failed, the monarchy, the Republic, autonomous regimes, parties, institutions, and men. When Francoism ends, with the death of Franco, all that will remain will be the failure of the regime and once again we’ll begin all over again from absolute zero.” Raymond Carr burst into laughter, shaking his head, in the face of a nihilism that reminded him of Baroja’s and seemed as ironic as it was absolute in someone named Sandro Vasari. “You’re even worse than the Spaniards,” he said, “you have the fanatical disbelief characteristic of all converts.”

  He didn’t reply because the discussion had become useless. Then he said to himself that the country was still on the uncertain eve of the eighteenth century. Three fundamental and irreplaceable freedoms—of expression, representation, and association—would soon be l’illusion mystique of the Iberian arena, as André Malraux, in another time, would call the libertarian communism of the anarchists. Two and a half centuries after Diderot, Spain believed in the voice of democracy with the same fervent ingenuousness as Diderot had believed in the voice of nature. On a file card Sandro kept a citati
on as a possible epigraph for a chapter in his book. Que nous dit cette voix (de la nature et des passions) de nous rendre heureux? Doit-on et peut-on en resister? Non, l’homme le plus vertueux et le plus corrompu lui obeissent également. Il est vrai qu’elle leur parle un langage bien different; mais que tous les hommes soient eclairés, et elle leur parlera à tous le langage de la vertu. Slowly he tore up the card. He felt the fear, familiar and therefore not too bitter, that the country would come late to its appointment with the past. “From Socrates to ourselves we have retreated centuries along the paths of the soul,” R. had once said to him, and then added: “The atrophy of science in our time is called Hiroshima. The crisis of reason has no name.” Sandro wondered what name would fit the crisis of Spain, a nation condemned to look for itself in a mirror lost behind its back. Immediately he shrugged. The question was too evident and the answers far too obvious. Any of Goya’s titles would be the right answer to the question. For example, Furious Absurdity.

  Goya. In reality who was Francisco Goya Lucientes, and above all who would he, Sandro Vasari, be in the eyes of Francisco Goya Lucientes? Until he learned how to establish his purpose as biographer in those terms, he would not know with any certainty what kind of book he intended to write about the owner of the Quinta del Sordo. The interior of every biography, as Ortega had discovered and predicated in vain with regard to that unparalleled genre, was, in the final analysis, an ideal sketch of the chronicler as seen by the subject. “If this land and its history are an Absurdity of Goya’s, each and every one of us is somewhere in his work, including, naturally, Franco himself in his death agony.” Goya, cauchemar plein de choses inconnues, / De foetus qu’on fait cuire au milieu des sabbats, / De vieilles au miroir et d’enfants toutes nues, / Pour tenter les démons ajustant bien leurs bas. Baudelaire was mistaken. The nightmare seemed filled not with the unknown but with the most visible contemporary history. In the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, Goya had predicted the destiny of the twentieth, as Bosch in the Middle Ages had anticipated the surrealists. If Goya had not existed, the country would have had to invent him in order to recognize itself, uselessly, in his work. “In his paintings and prints, our time and our destiny are arranged and ordered, just as, according to Cortázar, Don Quijote is hidden in the ink of an inkwell, and one of Garcilaso’s hendecasyllables is wandering, dispersed, in the pages of a dictionary.”

  When thinking about the Spanish eighteenth century, it would be better to forget about the Rights of Man and turn to Goya’s last four cartoons for the Royal Tapestry Factory. In Gudiol’s catalogue, Sandro contemplated The Meadow of San Isidro, The Hermitage of San Isidro, The Picnic, and Blind Man’s Bluff. Then he noticed for the first time that the four canvases, including the last one, comprised variations on a single theme: the fiesta and excursion on the saint’s day. Suddenly he also recalled that it was May 15, again under the sign of the bull, like the shootings, the return of the Desired One, the coronation of his father, and the fatal gorings of Pepe-Hillo, Joselito, Granero, and Varelito. A stone’s throw from the hermitage and its miraculous fountain was the Príncipe Pío Hill, the site of the Quinta del Sordo, and, naturally, Goya’s tomb in San Antonio de la Florida. A trail of blood in the sand seemed to lead him to the exact center of that arena, presided over by the second sign of the Zodiac, at the top of the Ecliptic of a country always identical to itself, from Goya to Picasso, from The Disasters of War to Guernica, through La Tauromaquia. Then he evoked Godoy’s final letter, still unpublished, whose photocopy R. had given him. “At times I think I’ve lived someone else’s dream: the dream of reason.”

  The bells in the town repeated ten in the morning. Sandro began to feel uneasy about Marina’s delay. As if he were waking from sleep, he also began to hear the radio still playing among the books. A popular Madrilenian figure, the Pirulo, displayed a poster of the princes of Spain, edged with the national flag, to the crowd gathered in front of the hospital complex. At the bottom of the profiles of Their Highnesses (Juan Carlos had not been acclaimed king, not yet) the caption said: The people love their Princes. Everything is tied up and tied up tight. The little girl María Mercedes del Mar Manzanares left a bouquet of flowers at the entrance to the hospital, along with an envelope she had written herself, which said: For Franco. Sandro turned off the radio and left the house.

  The snow was beginning to melt. Puddles were forming along the larger path, the one that went deep in the woods along wide turns, in the soil that had been divided by the Simca. The morning was almost springlike, and a sun of polished gold shone past slow-moving clouds. Through the brittle ice on the branches, at intervals made iridescent by the light, the entire forest seemed made of malachite. High in the sierra and with its back to France, the centuries were crumbling a watchtower. Sandro stopped for an instant, stamping on the snow, when he heard a crow cawing. The bird had survived the first cold spells and stridently proclaimed its presence in the thicket. Then he shouted for Marina and waited in vain for her response, straining to hear her in the distance. For a moment as interminable as the time we imagine asleep at the bottom of a well, he felt completely deaf in the silence that enfolded him. Then he thought he detected in some fold of consciousness a remote presentiment of all the sounds asleep now in winter. Everything that slithers, buzzes, gnaws, or flaps, hibernating or larval beneath the snow, pierced his spirit in a language so quiet that Sandro himself could not understand it.

  He followed the trail of the car on the road. With distant remorse, he blamed himself for having neglected Marina in recent days. (“Sandro, do you think I’m going crazy?”) While he stopped drinking in order to lose himself in his work, Marina behaved in increasingly inexplicable ways. First she said she had seen Goya’s bull in the forest, alive, with banderillas and the cape secure at the back of his neck, looking at her through the window with those eyes at once monstrously human and inconceivable. (“They were bloodshot and wide open, like in the painting, though his wasn’t an animal’s gaze but a man’s, a man chained in hell.”) Then she began to sink into long periods of remote silence that she savored, smiling and lying on the floor in any corner of the house. At times she burst into fits of completely unexpected and inappropriately shrill laughter. She would flee then to the countryside, regardless of whether it was day or night, and would not return until hours later, her hysteria apparently forgotten. At first Sandro tried to quiet her and reason with her. He became convinced almost immediately of the uselessness of his efforts, and isolated himself once again in his book. Now and then they would take a walk along that same path or have lunch at the inn in town, which smelled of vinegar, scorched meat, whitewash, and very old straw. One night they also had dinner at the hotel in town, under a large map of those lands and a reproduction of the last portrait of Fernando VII, painted by Goya, whose presence in the dining room Sandro could not explain to himself. On these occasions, and when they made laborious love at daybreak, they hardly spoke.

  He saw the car and heard the laughter almost at the same time. The Simca was parked and empty beside a slope protected by a grove of dark mimosa. Marina must have left it impetuously, in a rush, because the key was still in the ignition and a door was half-open. Sandro closed it before he put the key in his pocket. He proceeded as if unaware of what he was doing, listening to the laughter coming from some level fields at the foot of the incline and behind the mimosas. He crossed the thicket by a small trail that Marina had undoubtedly used. When he was barely past the foliage, at the end of a bend in the trail, he saw her sitting on a fallen trunk, profiled against the sky, her hands crossed on her knees. He shouted her name and she did not respond, though she seemed to call to him with a gesture somewhere between uncertain and absorbed. She was listening in a daze to the laughter rising from the deepest grass, and she beckoned to him. Having left the grove, and now next to Marina, he saw the four couples of Blind Man’s Bluff closing their circle in the scythed meadow around the young blindfolded man who tried to touch the
ir chests with his spoon. He failed, perhaps confused by the shrieks of the girls and the guffaws of the men. Staggering around, he waved the spoon in the air, while the others evaded his attempts and went on with the dance, consumed with joy in the midst of their affectations.

  “Sandro, do you see what I see?”

  “Yes,” he said in a voice as quiet as hers, “yes, I think I see it.”

  “Which is the hallucination here? Them or us?”

  He took a long time to answer. He felt his heart pounding and smelled the vague scent of smoke from the snow-covered woods. (“The water we touch in the rivers is the last of what has passed and the first of what is to come; just like the present day,” Leonardo had said so that R. could paraphrase it in that place.) The game of blind man’s bluff continued in the snow, accompanied by laughter. He closed his eyes for a few moments, but the laughter did not stop as he touched Marina’s back with a hand that seemed to belong to another man. The circle turned to the right, like the hands of a clock where the hours were living creatures. He recalled what he had written the night before (“It seems evident that all the protagonists in Blind Man’s Bluff are wearing costumes recently made to measure. They are members of a gilded rabble, as they would be called today, dressed like the authentic canaille on morning excursions to the miraculous fountain.”) Suddenly he also recalled the controversial adventure of Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain. Seventy or seventy-five years ago (Où sont-ils passes, les becs de gaz? / Que sont-elles devenues, les vendeuses d’amour?) two elderly English schoolteachers, virtuous, corseted, and pale, took their first trip to France one summer. They went to Versailles and suddenly, as they passed in front of the Trianon, they crossed paths with ladies, gentlemen, and petit-maîtres, coiffured, dressed, and shod in the rococo fashion. They even saw Marie Antoinette’s dairy and the queen herself, with her wide hoop skirt and triangular tulle shawl, sitting on a marble seat and leaning on a staff adorned with wild roses as she chatted with her ladies-in-waiting in a French the teachers did not understand. The next year Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain returned to Versailles, and the scene was repeated. The ecstasy of Sandro and Marina, however, was different. They weren’t conjuring up those who had lived in another century but figures in a painting, embodied as fops and dandies in short jackets and buckle shoes, in order to make them dance in the snow.