The Valley of the Fallen

by Carlos Rojas

  “Which is the hallucination here? Them or us?” Marina repeated.

  “We’re as true as they are,” he finally replied. “They’re playing blind man’s bluff for us.”

  “No, they’re playing blind man’s bluff for you. They don’t even notice my presence. This is a fiesta in your honor, a masked ball in the woods. Sandro, do you know who you are?”

  “This isn’t a country. Spain has never existed. It’s one of Goya’s Absurdities, established ages ago,” he had said to Marina a short while before. That day he’d had a premonition, confused and inexplicable, that another man inside him was saying those words. “I’m Sandro Vasari, a descendant of Giorgio Vasari and three generations of émigrés terroni,” he confessed to Marina when he met her again. Almost thirty years later, when Franco began his dying, he found himself obliged to admit a very different reality. “In this joke of a country, human beings aren’t capable of knowing who they are precisely because everything’s the same here.” Last spring, also in another life, he awoke at dawn, intoxicated, and scrawled in a notebook: “Saturn is my self-portrait and only tonight did I understand that.” Three weeks before, when he got drunk for the last time in the tavern in town, he heard again deep inside the hidden voice that, still sounding like someone else’s, seemed inexorably fused with his own. “Then I understood that if a monster inhabited man, this monster was always a puppet.” He thought he had returned to the most diaphanous of dreams, the one he ironically would forget for months on end only to recall it in the abandoned mill. He had lost his way in the labyrinth of the Great Pyramid, looking for its center, the point that would coincide with the death chamber of the pharaoh. On that groping pilgrimage through false mirrors, he began to wonder whether he was pursuing a dead man who did not exist: whether the pharaoh, in the most foolish kind of sarcasm, had built the pyramid with the sole intention of not being buried in its interior. When he finally found the crypt behind a door closed with a simple latch, he encountered the family of Carlos IV posing there, crowded together and waiting for a painter. Queen María Luisa smiled at him with her toothless mouth, and a moment before he awoke, she said to him: “Let’s go, let’s go. We’re waiting for you, arranged just as you said. You can begin the painting whenever you like.” That, however, was only a dream. (“The dream we see is the last of those that have passed and the first of those that will come; just like the present day.”) On the other hand, now they confronted living creatures, although they had come from a painting, and their laughter stunned the woods.

  “We are witnessing an illusion in reverse, in time and not in space; toward the past and not toward the future.”

  “I know very well what we are witnessing,” replied Marina. “It’s a painting but it’s alive. I also know that we have gone crazy, though not even this madness is ours.”

  “We’re not seeing a painting but its models.” He had to raise his voice, drowned out by laughter. “This isn’t Blind Man’s Bluff. It’s the final dance of the excursions to San Isidro, before those on the outing turn into monsters like the ones in the Quinta del Sordo.”

  “It’s Blind Man’s Bluff and they’re calling to us to enter the dance. At least they’re calling to you.”

  “It’s the last festivity before the catastrophe; but it falls to us only to observe it. We’re watching a May 15 of another century, and this is its dance of death.”

  “Its dance of death?”

  “There’s no other in this carnival. Everybody dresses as what they never were. They are the dandies and debutantes of the finest nobility. You can see that in their ease, their hands, even hear it in their laughter.”

  “It’s true,” Marina agreed softly. “More than figures by Goya they seem to be by Watteau.”

  “Still, they’re dressed like Goya’s dandies and flashy girls in order to dance in the snow as they do in the painting. Each era has its own dance of death, just as it has its own way of conceiving children.” He could feel Marina’s shoulder contract and straighten beneath his palm. “Blind Man’s Bluff is the eighteenth century’s. Ours, naturally, is Guernica.”

  This my dance now brings forward / these two beautiful maidens, / who came, very unwilling / to listen to my sad songs; / roses, blooms will not help them / nor their lovely adornments. / If they could they would leave but / they cannot, they are my wives. From the Dance of Death to Guernica, passing through Blind Man’s Bluff, the dead danced in living history, apparently condemned, with death as the only evidence. As the Dance of Death foretold from the agony of the Middle Ages, the fops and ridiculous beauties of Blind Man’s Bluff, dressed in the clothes of lower-class followers of bullfights, would soon reach for other masks as mortal as they were. Waiting for them were the holy father, the emperor, the cardinal, the king, the patriarch, the duke, the archbishop, the lord high constable, the bishop, the knight, in the common certainty of their destiny. Then dancers not yet conceived would join the circle in the turning of blood and of time. Dancing along with the flashy lower classes would be José Luis Pérez Olmedo, who wanted to offer one of his kidneys to Franco; the woman from Cuatro Caminos, with her medals, her ring, and her little paper Spanish flag; Gerardo González Serrano, the invalid gardener at El Pardo; Anselmo Paulino Álvarez, ambassador of the Dominican Republic and a personal friend of the Generalissimo; Salvador Tébar Jiménez with his bag of cement on his back; the Cuban exiles with their bouquets of roses; Lorenzo Valverde Ruiz, the disabled soldier of the Republic; the little girl María Ángeles Lazcano López, with her vase of flowers and her note in India ink; the little girl Paloma Trujillano, who wrote on her cards: “I keep praying”; the priest presented a medal of the Virgin of Alcalá; and the old woman from Jaén, who offered another medal of Our Lady of Tiscar, because Franco would honor her lands with his presence. In the same dance, the fiesta of the end of the world, Pirulo would come in then with his sign and María Mercedes del Mar Manzanares with her envelope for the Caudillo. “We’ll all go there and that’s the end of it.”

  “Each century is a circle of dancers and together they seem concentric, until forgetting begins to confuse them. Today Guernica and Blind Man’s Bluff seem like two completely different dances of death. Tomorrow they’ll be thought of as the same picture. Then the flashy girls and the dandies will be identical to the mangled monsters.”

  “Sandro, do you know who you are? Do you really know who we are?”

  “Blind Man’s Bluff tells you who we will be.”

  “No, Sandro, this isn’t an illusion in time and we are not who we are.” She spoke in a very low voice that the laughter of the dancers still muffled, but her nails dug into Sandro’s palm, and her hands were as cold as the blue wind that had just started to blow.

  “Who are we then?”

  “Neither we nor they really exist.”

  The circle quickened the turns, as if the wind were gently pushing the dancers. The laughter went from pealing to jingling and from jingling to chirping. The fop with the blindfolded eyes and wooden spoon hurried through his feints and charges. He also accelerated the turns, like a top when you let go of the whip.

  “Aren’t we anybody?

  “No, not us, not them.”

  “We see the same thing, therefore we exist, Marina, and what we see is as true as we are ourselves.”

  “Everything’s a lie, what’s seen and the eyes that see it! If R. hadn’t thought of Blind Man’s Bluff, these people in costume wouldn’t appear in the meadow. He’s the one who dresses them like the figures in the cartoon, the one who makes them laugh and dance in the snow. When he decides to forget them, they’ll disappear into thin air, as if they never had existed!”

  “How would they vanish? What does R. have to do with all this?”

  (“Sandro, do you think I’m going crazy?”) Filled with anxiety, he thought again of Marina’s strange behavior in recent days: the long silences, the abrupt fits of hilarity, interminable and unexpected. The vision of that bull with the eyes of a man condemned to hel
l, preceding the fata morgana of Blind Man’s Bluff that appeared to them both, as if a shared madness had united them in so unexpected and unbreakable a way after so many years. If Marina was crazy, there was a strange consistency in her madness, and above all a terrible accent of veracity in how it was expressed. “There is no certainty more convincing than that of madness,” he said to himself in terror. “The other realities, of the senses or of reason, are always debatable.”

  “Yes,” he repeated, hearing the uncertainty in his voice, “what does R. have to do with all this?”

  “Didn’t you ever stop to think that he determined almost every moment in our lives? It was R. who had to introduce us that day, in the courtyard of Letters. ‘There’s not a single creature on earth capable of knowing who he is,’ he said then, and I still seem to hear his voice, after thirty years, as clearly as I hear mine today. In reality he already knew, or sensed at least, that you and I weren’t anybody, because beginning that morning he was going to govern our future as if it were a farce perfectly suited to his whim.”

  “Let’s not undermine reality, Marina. Calm down.”

  “Here there’s no reality because we never had any. Our decisions and even our desires weren’t ours but his. I won’t say hopes, because he probably decided we didn’t deserve them. It was R. who found that room for you, under the Vallcarca Bridge, where we unwittingly made love at his command. You didn’t tell me but he did, so many years later when he decided we would meet again at supper in his house. He also told me then that he had given you the address of that woman, on Calle Moncada, where I lost your child and all the children I might have had. Do you remember the mirror in the room under the Vallcarca Bridge, blackened by time, with long purple cracks? Once in bed you told me that that someone, unchangeable and invisible, seemed to be watching us from the other side of the glass. Then I sensed the only truth, which is self-evident now. Nobody was looking at us because we really didn’t exist, even though we thought we were naked and embracing, just as the mirror didn’t exist, or the room, or the house. All of it, with us inside, was no more than a fiction woven by R. out of our supposed lives. We are only shades, like these phantoms dancing in the meadow, the shades of another man who never took pity on our fate after he had decided it!”

  The specters of Blind Man’s Bluff now seemed to become translucent, as if the fluid morning light were beginning to smooth and soften their profiles. And they slowed the turns of the circle, previously so hurried, as their tired laughter diminished. (“Sandro, do you think I’m going crazy?”) He looked at the dancers to avoid Marina’s eyes. Suddenly apprehensive, he asked himself what right he had to judge anyone, even Marina, at moments like those. One afternoon in the bedroom under Vallcarca Bridge, hadn’t he said that the two of them, Sandro and Marina, were another man’s rough draft, not knowing then either how to judge himself and her?

  “Let’s go home, Marina. We’ll continue talking about it there.”

  “The house isn’t ours. It belongs to R., like the lives we don’t have.”

  “Let’s go anyway. We can’t stay here.”

  “The house is R.’s,” she repeated, shaking her head. “The book you think you’re writing is his too, since he thought of it and then entrusted it to you. You’ll finish it when he decides to or you’ll abandon it when he feels like it. If you suddenly stopped drinking, so incredibly and so improbably, it was only because R. wanted you to, even though you don’t know it. He also decided that I should marry my husband and then leave him to follow you. He took control not only of our actions but of our words and our thoughts, too. If I lost my reason it was because he decreed my madness. I lost my mind but not even this insanity is mine! It belongs to him, just like our lives since that day in the courtyard of Letters!” She paused and let go of Sandro’s hand, pressing her elbows now against her body, her palms open.

  Blind Man’s Bluff had almost disappeared above the horizon of sky and woods. The laughter ceased, and the rushing steps and skips. In the air, as if traced on glass, a few white, green, red, violet, and saffron brushstrokes lingered. Gradually they became transparent.

  “We’ll go now, Marina, and then you’ll tell me everything again: who we are and who we never were. Not even the illusion keeps us here, because it’s finished. There’s nobody in the meadow.”

  “You don’t understand anything!” she shouted now, infuriated, shaking that profile of a woman painted and possessed by Piero della Francesca. “We’re the mirage! Since we really don’t exist, we can’t even hide our lies! Where are those two children of yours, by your second wife, who we were going to see in Colorado as soon as you finished the book?” Sandro’s eyes and lips hardened, as if the expression on his face had turned to metal. “You can hit me again! You can punch me until you break your fists, but I won’t be quiet now! You didn’t abandon your children, because R. didn’t want that to happen. Your children died! Do you hear me, Sandro, or do you want me to shout even louder? Your children are dead and no matter how you insist on forgetting it, you’ll never be able to deceive yourself! They died, just as mine will never be born, by the sovereign and incomprehensible decree of the man who is dreaming us. R. himself told me so last Saturday, when he called while you were sleeping! First he asked me how the book was going and I lied, telling him it was almost finished. Then I added something that I sincerely believed was true then: ‘As soon as Sandro turns in the manuscript, we’ll go to the United States. He wants me to meet his children.’ His silence surprised me, and the tone of his voice after that parenthesis. ‘His two children died in an accident when they were very young. Sandro never wanted to accept or believe it. He finally convinced himself that they were alive and he had abandoned them. I learned the truth from his second wife, whom he divorced a year later.’”

  Marina was crying now, her face hidden in her hands. An astonished Sandro said to himself that he had never seen her cry before. It was a distress without words and almost without sobs. A long sound of buried springs, and a tremor.

  “They both died in a car accident on Christmas Eve, in a year I don’t want to remember,” Sandro said then. “My wife, who was with us, was thought dead when they brought her to the hospital; but in a few weeks she recovered. Then I had to confess the truth to her about our children. We never forgave ourselves for having survived them. We skidded on the icy highway and drove over an embankment. I was driving and survived the crash without a scratch. That’s all. This is the first time I’ve had the courage to talk about it. My wife has despised me ever since because I didn’t kill her too. We divorced the following year.”

  For the first time, although he still couldn’t confess it to Marina, he told himself that on that Christmas Eve he hadn’t killed anybody, even though his two children died then. He had been drinking, as his second wife would tell him repeatedly; but he was driving with the judgment and prudence of someone very accustomed to the wheel. The car skidded on an unexpected patch of ice, and then he couldn’t straighten it out or stop it when it began its somersault down the embankment. If Marina was right and they were only a nightmare or a diversion of R.’s, then she would also have to say that their master and executioner also dreamed the ice in order to send him, Sandro Vasari, to the center of a hell different from the measure of his punishment. “What is your idea of happiness on earth?” a voice asked or asked again, deep inside, a strange voice but not unknown, at the thought of hell. He was going to answer it, or answer himself: “My return to that Christmas Eve, before the car turned over, to see my children alive, if only for an instant.” And yet, without too much surprise, he heard himself murmur hastily: “To die before my son Xavier. My wife and I already buried four others before I had to bury her too in the famine during the war. I don’t want to lose this one.” The other voice, the strange but not unknown voice, burst into laughter at the bottom and in the middle of his chest.

  Marina was sobbing. As he did on that distant late afternoon, at the corner of Calle Moncada and the Arco d
e San Vicente, Sandro picked her up to lead her away, his arms around her waist, not saying anything. He wanted to cross the plantings with her and give her time to calm down before starting the walk back to the car. “We’re another man’s draft.” At times, in that other, distant life, and when he detailed for R. his erotic moments before the darkened mirror, he thought he had a premonition that he would divulge them on another day in his own words. Could Marina be right when she stated that they weren’t part of a story, but the story itself? In other words, R. wouldn’t write secretly about their lives. He would live them vicariously when he imagined them, and he and Marina would have no other existence except that of creatures in a book in the mind of its creator.

  He stopped in the center of the meadow, Marina still pressed to his chest. The dancers had trampled and disturbed the snow, dividing it with their steps. At the bottom of their footprints the grass was green, as if it were made of the same malachite as the entire forest, though smoother and more polished. Incredibly, chance had in this way traced two words on the ground from the tracks of the figures in Blind Man’s Bluff. Sandro read them letter by letter while the sun erased them as it melted the snow. Written in large, uneven type, they read: furious absurdity.