The Valley of the Fallen

by Carlos Rojas

  “The whole country is made of shadows and theater,” I said when he stopped laughing, because before that he wouldn’t have heard me. “Here there never was and never will be anything real. Not even grief, because in the long run, that’s forgotten too.”

  “Oh no, old man! You’re wrong!” he replied, sitting up quickly. “When you paint, you must see what no one else can; in other words, what you call the truth. But sometimes, when you speak, you don’t seem deaf but blind. In the final analysis, the country will have three undeniable realities: the people, you, and I.”

  “Why we three, Señor?” Even without hearing my shouts, I knew that I was shouting. “What moral right can accompany us when we deny everyone in times of trial? If God sits in judgment, you will be condemned just like the people and just like me.”

  “From this I ought to deduce that if you were God, you wouldn’t absolve any one of the three.”

  “Your Majesty can deduce whatever you like best. Besides, in this case, you are absolutely right. I am nobody, but I know very well that you share in our condemnation.”

  “We’re very different, old man, and naturally you’re more heartless.” He shrugged again. “With no remorse to speak of, I thought I was a tiger because I never pardoned any of my enemies. Not my mother, who’s dead; or Godoy, in exile now; or Riego, after executing him; or Napoleon, in hell for having dispossessed me and insulted me when I was defenseless. All of them humiliated me as if I were a beaten dog, and to them I shall always be a rabid dog, in this life or any other. If the ghost of my first wife were to appear, the human being I loved most, and begged on her knees that I pardon any of them, including my mother, I’d turn my head so I wouldn’t hear her.” He made an effort to smile, as if trying to soften the severity of his tone. “You never thought I was so obstinate, did you? Rancor is another virtue I share with my people.”

  Rancorous, of course I knew that. But I also wondered who he thought the people were. Perhaps individuals like the Gypsy, his mistress Pepa de Málaga, or her charming former pimp, Chamorro, or like Ugarte, the odd-job man; the rabble who, as they said, would use tú with him when he was alone and call him master? I was convinced he would feel much closer to that scum than to all the kings of Europe. At the same time I was certain this was not my idea. It belonged to that man, who perhaps without knowing it was me in a time that had not happened yet: the man foretold in the circus on the Rue du Manège by the Living Skeleton.

  “Even more than those dead and Godoy himself, who is dying in Paris, the people taunted and abused you when they assaulted the palace six years ago. You seem to have forgotten that.”

  “It was much worse afterward, when I withdrew my confidence from the government and precipitated the crisis, hoping that the hundred thousand Sons of Saint Louis would reach Madrid in time and rescue me from the claws of the liberals. The mob entered howling like demons, while the Royal Guard looked up to heaven or fraternized with them. With their sticks they smashed the cut-glass drops on the lamps because the clinking amused them, and they ripped open the sofas with their knives. We had to hide in a garret filled with brooms and old straw mats, and from there we heard them shouting for my neck and shrieking at the queen that they would send her back to a brothel in Germany. Imagine my poor wife, the third one, the pious one! The one who wrote verses to the Vespers Service on the Day of the Conception! Even greater humiliations were waiting for us that summer, when Parliament removed me from the throne, saying I was mad. They sent us to Cádiz from Sevilla in a closed carriage because the hundred thousand Sons of Saint Louis had already entered Andalucía. On the road, and as we passed through the towns, droves of peasants assaulted the carriage and forced us to push up against the windows in order to spit at us. Inside the heat was infernal, a heat I can’t even describe to you when I remember it. The queen fainted several times. I even thought she had died . . .”

  “And still you forgave them everything.”

  “That same people returned us in triumph to Madrid, after freeing us from the troops of the duke de Angoulême. By then I could have strolled alone and unarmed through the streets and the people would have argued over my feet in order to kiss them. In the churches they worshiped my plaster image, wrapped in a theatrical cloak. I pardoned the people for the same reasons that, long before, I had pardoned you for your treason when you collaborated with the Intruder King. For precisely the same reasons that I always absolved my own felonies. You and I and the people are identical. In this world of dreams we are all that’s certain. To save our life we would pardon everything, our honor and our soul, because we are deeply convinced that no reality, at least on earth, exists beyond ourselves . . . I don’t know whether you understood everything I said.”

  “I understood very well, Señor. But I also remember your taking revenge.”

  “The people celebrated the tortures, which were public and very much applauded. I showed no mercy to the truly seditious, those who hadn’t committed treason in order to survive but to impose delusions like liberty and the rights of man. Along with Torrijos and his people, they arrested a boy of twelve who acted as messenger for the conspiracy. I remember that when they invaded the palace in order to impose the Constitution on me, they showed me another boy and roared that he was the son of General Lacy, whom I’d had shot earlier. Then I wrote in my own hand the order to execute Torrijos and his band. I put a note at the bottom: ‘Have them kill the boy too.’ Are you shocked, old man?”

  “You don’t shock me, Señor; but I prefer knowing I’m the one responsible for the death of my children and not of that boy.”

  “There are no disputes in questions of taste, my friend.” He smiled and stretched out in the chair again. With his moistened fingertip he caressed the rim of the glass over and over again, absorbed in delight, until the glass shrieked like a rusty knife blade against the whetstone.

  “Señor, I beseech you!”

  “Ah, forgive me! I thought you heard absolutely nothing.”

  “Those shrieks I can hear. And claps of thunder sometimes, when they’re very far away.”

  “In dreams I hear the voices of the emperor and my mother in the castle of Maracq, when they forced me to renounce the crown. I don’t see them, I only hear them and always as close as if I had returned to that Dantesque day. Vous êtes très bête et très, très mechant! that bandit roared, and my mother shrieked at me in Spanish: ‘Bastard! Bastard!’” He smiled, shaking his head, as if he wanted to drive away all the nightmares of the memory. “I was more afraid for my life at that moment than at any other time, including the journey from Sevilla to Cádiz. Yet even in my panic, I thought that my mother and Napoleon were as awful as they were grotesque. They were speaking languages that weren’t theirs and anger made their Italian accent seem coarse.”

  “Your Majesty should have resisted that pillage by every means possible. Blood had already been spilled in Madrid and you, Señor, were not unaware of the uprising. You renounced the throne while men killed or were shot dead invoking your name.”

  “In Maracq they would have murdered me if I had refused to abdicate. History is nothing but forgetting all the blood spilled in vain. In the end, the result was almost the same, although now my brother would be king instead of me. In that case the Holy Inquisition would have been reestablished, and you would be living not in exile but in its dungeons, because he would have brought back autos-da-fé in the Plaza Mayor and burned people at the stake. My brother is a fanatic. I’m only a frightened man.”

  “What inheritance can your fear leave us?”

  “The museum I’ll open in the Prado,” he exclaimed, suddenly becoming animated and slapping me on the knees. “The museum I’ll create to your glory with the paintings from the Real Casa!”

  “Tomorrow people will forget that you founded the museum, but they’ll remember your betrayals and the gallows in the Plaza de la Cebada. In France Moratín once read to me a quotation from Shakespeare that you have no right not to know. The evil that
men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. This is the fate of power, but yours could have been different . . .”

  “Why would it have been?”

  “When you returned from Valençay you were the Desired One, the Only One. I doubt that any other man on earth has been awaited with more fervor in his own country. Do you remember the mob that kissed your hands and sobbed on the way to the San Isidro fountain? Then you could have started from nothing and truly been the king of all of us. This is a nation of beasts and imbeciles that will never begin to find itself until it recognizes its ferocity and stupidity and overcomes them. It was up to you to help them, Señor, because an opportunity like yours will not be repeated. Your grandfather, who never had it, would have grasped it immediately. The illusion of an entire people is the most powerful force in the world, and you were ours. An uncommon destiny allowed you to bring us peace, harmony, work, and above all hope. But you left us hatred, fanaticism, poverty, and despair. If God doesn’t prevent it, you’ll leave behind a century of civil wars. This is your legacy: the law of the garrote, which was going to transform this madhouse into an arcadia, as you told me on the way to San Isidro. Now you can’t even guarantee dynastic succession. Once again we’re living between terror and uncertainty, because your days are almost as numbered as mine. You’re not yet fifty and you look like a man almost my age.”

  “Did you stop to think that perhaps I couldn’t redeem the people, as you say, precisely because I spoke their language and came from them?” he asked without warning, looking at me intently. “Despots like me do not improvise and are not fully responsible for their governmental actions. They are the inevitable consequence of the scars and leprosy of all of you. I come out of this people, like heat from a fire, and together we have touched bottom. About this, at least, we agree.”

  “Yes, Majesty,” I nodded. “About this, at least, we agree.”

  He stopped speaking and sank back into the armchair and his reflections, biting his lips above his equine jaw, where the shadow of his beard was beginning to turn his chin blue. He drank the cognac in his glass in a sudden mouthful, grimacing as if it repelled him. Then he began again to rub the lip of the glass with distracted persistence. He finally produced that shriek of a swift that penetrated my deafness like a needle.

  “Possibly we won’t see each other again,” he said with a sigh, facing me again. “The truth is that in spite of everything I said, I believe I feel closer to you than to the people.” He burst into laughter when he noticed my confusion. “Yes, yes, closer to you, and not because I appreciate your painting even more than you can value it, but because at one time we both loved the same woman.”

  “The same woman, Majesty . . . ?”

  “Someone who died a long time ago. It seems incredible to think that if she had lived, she’d be a very old woman.”

  “Yes,” I nodded again, as my memory wove shadows in time. “It seems incredible.”

  “I was referring to María Teresa,” he explained unnecessarily, laughing now like a madman. “Do you remember her, old man?”

  “I think about her often, Majesty.”

  “My mother thought she was the very devil. I haven’t thought about her for some time. Years, perhaps. I don’t know why you obliged me to remember her tonight, without realizing it. When she was your mistress, I was a little boy, but I adored her in silence. That is, I was mad for her. Good God, you rogue, you didn’t deny yourself anything in those days! You were a satyr in my parents’ court! I would have liked to become you, down to the marrow of your bones, just to know I was hers! I began to desire her then as I would desire only my own life when they tried to snatch it away from me. And what a beautiful filly she must have been in bed! Isn’t that right? If I close my eyes I see her again as clearly as I see you now, chipped by age. Women like her don’t exist nowadays, do they? They broke the mold!”

  Before I died I had to lose my speech as well. My entire right side, from my cheek to my foot, must be dead because I can’t feel it. I look at my right hand on the sheets and again it seems to belong to someone else. Perhaps it belongs to that man whose voice sometimes sounds inside me from a time that hasn’t happened yet. I return now definitively and forever to the “Frenzied Absurdity,” which is life itself. Mine in this bed or in a book that he’ll write in another century. In any case, I won’t survive the Desired One, who at times had that look of a wounded fawn that my María del Pilar Dionisia had in the cradle. And I won’t return to Spain alive, where he told me that letting himself die is man’s greatest madness.

  Xavier arrived and I still had time to embrace him before the final stroke. Then, when I was mute and crippled, he went to an inn with my daughter-in-law and Marianito, because his wife could not tolerate the sight of my agony. Leocadia told me everything when I asked for my son and my grandson. What she didn’t tell me is that she herself is hiding Rosarito to spare him the interminable death of an old man. Leocadia herself, very thin and aged by her vigils, sits with me at all hours without mentioning my family or my inheritance. (“You’re so blind you don’t even see your own stupidity! You dumb bastard! Don’t you understand that they came only to be sure you hadn’t changed your will? They don’t give a damn about your blood, your name, even 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 let you rot in exile without seeing the whites of your eyes . . .”) Leocadia went to bed tonight too, exhausted. Only people who are almost strangers sit with me. The two French doctors (Vous êtes un grand homme, un peintre de la Chambre. On va vous soigner!); the owner of this house, José Pío de Molina, the former mayor of Madrid after the victory of Riego, and a student of mine at the Academia de San Fernando who followed me into exile: Antoñito Brugada. I’d like to tell them that I’ll soon be in the presence of Velázquez.

  After my voice I lost my sight. In a sense, now the silence around me has become absolute, because I can no longer read lips. Yet I can still distinguish their shapes and, in a confused way, their faces. The doctors wear black frock coats. They have Van Dyke beards. They milk them, caress them, and comb them, according to their mood. They gave me valerian again, but valerian no longer cures anything. They applied leeches and the leeches didn’t take hold. They rubbed me down, auscultated me, painted me with iodine, burned me with mustard plasters. I think they didn’t sprinkle me with holy water and exorcize me because it didn’t occur to them. Antoñito Brugada, who bustles all around the room, is a boy (to me he’s still a boy even though he must be getting on in years by now) who paints very good seascapes. When I could still make out his features, I saw his eyes and nose reddened from crying so much. He leans over the bed and looks at me straight on, in profile, and from God’s point of view. Whatever his sorrow, which I believe is very sincere, art has greater sway over him than grief, and he is preparing to sketch me when I’m dead, though perhaps he isn’t aware of his own intention.

  José Pío de Molina is tall, sad, and as thin as an official of the Holy Office. He is also the freest and most generous man I have ever known, though I came to know him well only in exile. I’m going to leave unfinished the portrait of him I was doing when I fell ill. As he was sitting for me, I recounted part of my last conversation with the Desired One. (“When you returned from Valençay you were the Desired One, the Only One. I doubt any man on earth has been awaited in his own country with greater fervor. Do you remember the mob that kissed your hands, sobbing, on the way to the fountain of San Isidro? Then you could have begun from nothing and truly been the king of all of us. This is a nation of beasts and imbeciles who will never begin to find their future until they recognize their ferocity and stupidity in order to overcome them. It was your responsibility to help, Señor, because an opportunity like yours will not be repeated.”) “It is sad for a people to await the death of a man in order to find its future,” said Pío de Molina, “because the dead only bury the dead. Christ himself said they aren
’t useful for anything else.” I asked him whether he had not considered the possibility that we had no future at all and that in a century or a century and a half, two Spaniards like us, also exiled in Bordeaux, would repeat our doubts and our words. “It is possible,” he replied, half-closing his narrow inquisitor’s eyes, “because one would not call our destiny true; it is written instead in a madman’s novel where everything is repeated in different centuries.”

  Yes, I would like to tell them that I’ll soon be in the presence of Velázquez. When I was very young, long before His Majesty Don Carlos III and the prince and princess of Asturias granted me their first audience in response to his petition, my oldest brother-in-law took me to the palace to show me the paintings by Velázquez in the royal collection. Francisco Bayeu was the court painter then, and his contemptuous pride did not permit him to praise anyone in my presence. Which was why I was very surprised when he said to me: “Today you’ll see the paintings of someone I could never envy, just as I don’t envy God for having created light and air.” It wasn’t air or light that Velázquez created but man. This was the undeniable center of his universe, where the heavens were sometimes transformed into tapestries and sometimes into mirrors. Before his paintings and in spite of his intrinsic and almost distracted serenity, I felt a blow in the middle of my heart. If I had been alone, I would have burst into tears, and only the presence of Francisco Bayeu could stop me from doing that. “This man was a jester and a clerk in the court of Felipe IV. His name was something like Diego de Acedo y Velázquez, but they called him The Cousin, mocking his supposed family connection to the painter,” my brother-in-law told me in front of the portrait of a seated dwarf, with a large book on his knees and a still life of notebooks, papers, pens, and inkwells all around him. “Notice the insistent disproportion between the smallness of his diminutive hands and the enormous size of the book, a quarto edition on fine paper, that he’s holding on his tiny legs. And also his head, very large in comparison to his body, grows even bigger thanks to the black broad-brimmed hat he wears pulled far down on one side of his head.” On the same wall and next to the portrait of that clown hung one of another buffoon, sitting on the floor and facing us. In the foreground, the soles of his tiny shoes were as clean as if he were wearing them for the first time. “About this one we don’t know much more than his name,” my brother-in-law continued. “He was Sebastián de Morra, the jester of Prince Don Baltasar Carlos. They say that once, when the queen sent a lady-in-waiting to buy sweets, the shopkeeper refused to give them to her because the palace owed too large a bill. The lady, in tears, happened to meet the buffoon on her way back from the shop, and he gave her a cuarto so that the sovereign would not be deprived of her dessert. Notice the disparity of his limbs in relation to his head, with its large forehead, and his tall man’s torso.” I was enraptured before the eyes of the jesters. One would say that Velázquez had begun by painting them in the middle of the empty canvas, as if it were the obligatory center of those unlikely creatures. Their eyes, streaming deep inside in long, moist glances, humanized the monsters born and trained to make others laugh, like the jugglers’ dogs or tamed monkeys at court. When many, very many years later, the Desired One spoke to me about our people, deformed and grotesque like those unfortunates, I thought of the eyes of Velázquez’s dwarfs and asked myself whether, in his long road to his own center, he would ever find his true reason for being and his authentic freedom.