The Valley of the Fallen

by Carlos Rojas

  Parliament approved the move of the royal family to Sevilla and then dissolved so that the executive power could be centered on the war effort. Once it had dissolved, Fernando attempted another coup, and by sudden royal decree unexpectedly replaced the entire government on February 19, 1823. Panic gave him the audacity needed for that act of strength, which was soon aborted. He wanted to remain in Madrid at all costs and wait there for the soldiers of the duke de Angoulême, from whom he expected liberation. When the decree was published, mobs assaulted the palace again. They beat the servants with clubs, destroyed mirrors and windows, broke furniture, and tore down hangings. Men crippled in the War for Independence displayed braided cords that they said they would use to hang the Desired One from a rafter. With studied delay the national militia intervened, and after long deliberations achieved the withdrawal of the masses. On March 10, early in the morning and escorted by a simple detachment of militiamen, the monarch and his people left for Sevilla. The French marched into Madrid, and the crowd offered them a reception comparable to the welcome they had given to Riego, and to the Desired One himself on his return from Aranjuez or from exile. In many churches they enthroned his image on the altar and the faithful prayed to him as if he were the Son of God. In Sevilla the sovereign attended the Holy Week processions. He gave public displays of great devotion, which in his heart he was far from feeling. In the meantime, he prepared an insurrection with the great Andalusian nobles, who would rouse the peasantry, led by officers of the Royal Guard, to restore absolutism. Their intrigues betrayed, and in the face of the advancing hundred thousand Sons of Saint Louis, who had already passed through Despeñaperros, the Parliament decided that the monarchs should flee to Cádiz. The city, guarded by the Trocadero garrison and accessible only by means of the isthmus, lent itself to a long defense. The Desired One, who feared prison and even death at the end of that exodus, refused to leave Sevilla.

  An urgently convened Parliament declared the incompetence of the Desired One and the transfer of his powers to a regency council. The judicial reasoning that deposed Fernando was hurried, and for the most part as fallacious as almost all justifications of history. A monarch who preferred voluntary surrender to the invader over flight and resistance was a traitor or a madman. No one placed His Majesty’s patriotic ethic in doubt, and therefore his intellectual incapacity was manifest. On the road to Cádiz, the Desired One and his party were subjected to all kinds of odious affronts. They were obliged to kiss the glass in their carriage and display themselves like captive beasts to the furor of the crowds of peasants. These were the same masses of olive pickers, reapers, and cattle herders, all of them slaves to the usual famine, who would have risen up, howling “Long live the absolute king!” if Fernando had triumphed in his conspiracy in Sevilla. A man hung from the carriage door, raised a tightly clenched fist, and shouted at the sovereign: “You’re nobody anymore! You’ll never rule again!” He was half wrong, because the constitutional regime would lead not to the Republic, as Riego had erroneously predicted, but to the most brutal of despotisms devised by the Desired One himself. Liberated by the French, who lay siege to Cádiz and easily took the Trocadero, Fernando disembarked in the Puerto de Santa María. He listened with a smile to the cheers for absolutism by the mobs that not long before had called for his eyes and entrails. The duke de Angoulême, who despised him now almost as much as he abhorred all of Spain, unwillingly ordered that homage be paid to him. “But, my dear Duke, didn’t they say I was crazy?”

  The executions began immediately. They killed Riego in the Plaza de la Cebada after a public Calvary that debased the regime. (The people shouted “Long live the Holy Inquisition!” and the Desired One shouted “Long live Riego and the mother who bore him” when he received the news of his death.) Disgusted, the duke de Angoulême left Madrid. The Holy Alliance was horrified, and Louis XVIII wrote an indignant letter to Fernando VII: Un despotism aveugle, loin d’accroître le pouvoir des Rois, l’affaiblit; car si leur puissance ne connaît point de règles, s’ils ne respectent aucune loi, ils succombent bientôt sous le poids de leurs caprices. The Desired One smiled and shrugged. No one had the right to give him lessons in good government. The absolutists hurled themselves into the field to exterminate the blackguards to the fourth generation. The rabble cheered him, just as they had adored him on his return from Valençay, and he felt much closer to those masses than to all the kings in the world. Wrapped in his threadbare dressing gown and smoking like a wagon driver, he again received beggars in his public audience. When a water seller told him that the magistrates had taken away his place on the Plaza de Oriente, he ordered it returned, and over the tap a sign was placed that read: “Water sold here by Royal Order.”

  The Desired One married three times after the death of María Antonia of Naples. In September 1816 he was wed to his niece Isabel de Braganza, daughter of Princess Carlota, whose hump Goya had hidden behind the prince of Bourbon Parma. Poor, a peasant, and Portuguese, as she was called by the people in some mocking, defamatory verses, the queen miscarried and died three years later, leaving no descendants. A sister of hers, María Francisca, was married to Prince Don Carlos. She became a mother before Isabel’s death and boldly aspired to the throne for her husband and their heirs. In August 1819 the Desired One married Amalia of Saxony, almost twenty years younger than he. The new queen, very white-skinned and blue-eyed, like the porcelain shepherdesses of her country, wrote verses in the style of the Fioretti of Saint Francis and read the poets of the English Lake District who had been translated into German. On his wedding night, the Desired One surprised the entire palace when he left the bedroom red with rage and swearing like one possessed. Amalia, who had lost her mother when she was very young and grew up in a convent, felt a hysterical, violent repugnance to carnal relations with her husband. The Desired One petitioned for and obtained an intervention by the pope to bring the queen to reason. She ceded finally, more as a Christian than as a wife, but as it turned out, she was barren. She died on May 18, 1829, leaving the monarch no children.

  Seven months later, Fernando married again. Like his old jailer in Valençay, the Desired One could state that he was looking not for a woman but a uterus where his blood could survive. The chosen one was María Cristina, his young Neapolitan niece, almost a quarter century younger than he. Princess Luisa Carlota, Cristina’s sister and the sister-in-law of the king, her uncle, was the wife of Prince Don Francisco de Paula, and she arranged the wedding. Ironically, the Desired One would surrender his will to this final wife with the dark eyes and diminutive ears, as Villa Urrutia described her, whose faint smile and natural kindness were admired by the people and by the court. Even more ironically, a resentful Infante Don Carlos, who had opposed the marriage by all the means at his disposal, represented the king when he married by proxy in the chapel of the royal estate at Aranjuez. On March 29, 1830, the Desired One proclaimed the Pragmatic Sanction, reestablishing the Law of the Seven Parts and repealing an act of Felipe V that excluded females as heirs to the crown. Don Carlos and Doña María Francisca protested angrily, since they believed that the prince would have more valid right to the throne if María Cristina, who was pregnant at the time, gave birth to a girl. She was born on October 10 and baptized with the name María Isabel. On January 30, 1832, the queen gave birth to another daughter, María Luisa Fernanda. In September, severe attacks of gout brought the king to death’s door. At the age of forty-seven he was an old man, and the doctors lost all hope. Pressured by the prime minister, Calomarde, and by the bishop of León, María Cristina gave in and permitted the Desired One to sign a codicil in which he revoked the Pragmatic Sanction.

  Don Carlos, whose rights supported the absolutist Spain that was prepared to extirpate the blackguards down to the fourth generation, now believed his inheritance was assured. In La Granja, Princess Luisa Carlota chided the queen, who cried in her arms. (Regina di galleria!) She slapped Calomarde with all her strength. (“White hands do not offend, Señora.”) She tore
the codicil into a thousand pieces and established a cordon sanitaire around the dying man, which excluded visits from Don Carlos and from his wife. Unexpectedly, the Desired One, always cunning in the art of survival, recovered enough to publish a manifesto in which he denounced the stratagems of Carlism. “Perfidy finished off the horrible plot, begun by sedition.” Don Carlos fled to Portugal and began the regency of María Cristina. On October 16, 1832, he decreed a broad amnesty and soon afterward granted a general pardon. On June 20, 1833, the Parliament swore allegiance to Isabel in the Church of San Jerónimo. The king attended the ceremony, dragging legs that could barely support him. The interminable ceremony bored the little princess. She played with the lions carved into the arms of the chair, and the queen reprimanded her twice. The Desired One smiled. With death hovering over him, he stopped fearing it for the first time and found it difficult to recognize himself in that unexpected indifference. He too was bored in San Jerónimo, while the grandees of Spain, the nobles and the prelates, swore their allegiance. His head began to nod; fatigue overwhelmed him, and Spain inevitably approached civil war. Outside, in the bell towers, all the bells of Madrid rang out with glory.

  Three months later, on September 29, he collapsed facedown onto the table when he finished lunch. Plates and crockery fell to the floor, where they clinked or shattered. An already clawed hand crushed the tablecloth. The queen stood up, screaming, while a chamberlain and two gentlemen-in-waiting rushed to help the king. His eyes were wide open and his smile, twisted in astonishment, was stained by a trickle of very red blood. Fernando VII, the Desired One, had just died.

  November 21, 1975

  Across a lake that would calm at a distance the waters of time, he heard the screech of his finger against the glass. He closed his eyes and saw the frozen lake where a pack of white bears with pink eyes, terrified by the screech that grew inside itself as it was repeated, like a spiral, were fleeing. In his fatigue, Sandro wanted to shout at them in vain that the ice of time would crack like mica, wounded by stridency. Beneath the ice spread nothingness, interminable and absolute, with no fish, no stars, no seaweed, no monsters: a nothingness that would devour the terrified bears as if they never had been. Suddenly darkness fell over his eyes, and the screech of the martyrized glass quieted, ending in a crash of crockery and forks scattered on the floor before silence fell. In that stillness, which seemed shocking because it was unexpected, he heard one of the voices he had learned to recognize in dreams. “Sleep if you like and go back to Bordeaux whenever you want to. I was hoping you would die here of old age, to give you a funeral worthy of Apelles. I would have had your body lying in state in the Puerta de Alcalá, watched over by the royal halberdiers and a troop of cavalry. In single file, all the way to the Ventas del Espíritu Santo, people would have waited all night to see you dead. The rabble attends executions as well as funerals. They’re all part of the same circus.”

  Somewhere, perhaps in the book by Arzadin y Zabala, Sandro had read that after the war, when the Desired One returned, there weren’t even chandeliers in the Palacio de Oriente. Everything had been looted by the invaders when they fled. Perhaps he hadn’t read it in Arzadin y Zabala, he immediately said to himself. Maybe he had learned it in a much simpler but also a more inexplicable way. In any case, he continued to reflect, the palace without chandeliers would not have been the right place to receive Goya’s remains on their return from Bordeaux. Better to display them in the Puerta de Alcalá, very close to where the old bullring had been and where Barbudo killed Pepe-Hillo. “Circus. I’ll never go back to the circus on the Rue du Manège where I would take Rosarito to forget myself, watching the tumblers suspended for a moment between heaven and this hell we call earth. There the animals became buffoons and men played with wild beasts, as in the garden of earthly delights,” the other voice continued, the one that Sandro knew, beneath his forehead, was his.

  He became accustomed to the voices, as he did to their footsteps. Four or five years earlier, at Princeton, he had met Julian Jaynes, who spoke to him about a work of his, written over a long period of time, about the origins of the interior life. According to Jaynes, the human species developed language a hundred thousand years before Christ. But it did not discover consciousness and reason until some thousand years before the Christian Era. In the interim, men were guided by magical, mystic voices that advised them and filtered through the right cerebral hemisphere, which still happens to paranoids. Between the second and first millennia before Christ, vast migrations, and the increasingly extensive use of the written word, created societies too complex to be governed by oracles and visionaries. The species learned then to become absorbed in thought, and inside itself it found knowledge. Sandro reminded Jaynes, who took hurried notes, that Ortega had said that four centuries before our era, Socrates had discovered reason in the squares of Athens, although the pre-Socratics used it earlier without reducing life to its format. Then he added that in a sense the regime of sacred, inexplicable voices demonstrated its validity by surviving almost one hundred thousand years. “Perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go back to it and undo everything we have done in the course of three millennia.” Julian Jaynes shrugged and smiled. “You’re killing my book, Vasari my friend.” “No, I’m simply proposing that you write another one with a totally different intention.”

  Now, with his eyes closed in his study, or rather, in R.’s study, where Marina watched television in silence, Sandro said to himself that the strange voice heard so often had eventually become his own. “Whoever I may be, R.’s rough draft or a man of flesh and bone with an inalienable identity, I’m also the one who speaks and agonizes inside me. The one who also listens to other beings inside me who speak to him or rebuke him.”

  It was night on television, and the night was in Madrid. Franco had died and his remains were moved from the Pardo to the Palacio de Oriente. They watched over him there, in the Hall of Columns, where, according to announcers, they had prepared the catafalque of María de las Mercedes, the first wife of Alfonso XII. That room, decorated with Isabelline lamps, frescoes by Corrado Giaquinto, marble floors, and funerary hangings brought from the Hieronymites and the Royal Slaves, had been chosen because of its easy access and two entrances. Endless lines, contained and flanked by low railings, stretched toward the Plaza de España and were lost from view. They spoke of hundreds of thousands of people prepared to spend the night and morning standing outdoors to bid farewell to the corpse. (“Their brothers are not unknown to me. I see in all of them the same crowds that cheered Godoy, the Desired One, the Intruder King, Riego, the Obstinate One. They’re also the ones who dragged Godoy along the ground in Aranjuez, stabbing his legs; the ones who brought Riego to the scaffold in a charcoal seller’s basket and then stoned the quarters of his body, hacked to pieces by axes and displayed on the pillars of twenty cities; the ones who gutted the Obstinate One with goads and razors when he was handcuffed in a cage, and danced with joy as the executioner burned his remains; the ones who invaded the Palacio de Oriente with ropes to hang the Desired One, and on the road to Cádiz obliged him to kiss the windows of his coach in order to spit in his eyes.” Before the main entrance to the palace, the guards repeated unceasingly: “Remember that you cannot take in packages, handbags, or cameras. Remember that you cannot take in packages, handbags, or cameras. Remember . . .” Toward the end the column slowed and came to a stop. The ushers asked that they pass the coffin in fours; but no one wanted to find himself separated from the bier by other lines of people. The night was serene and icy.

  Outside were first-aid stations, and from time to time bells struck the hour. The announcers counted the faithful who passed the cadaver, because that, as one of them said, was unforgettable history. Priests blessed the body lying in state and soldiers saluted it in military fashion. There were people who fell to their knees at the feet of the dead man, while others crossed themselves when they saw him. (“I have seen them on the San Isidro excursions and picnics, in church, at the bu
llfights, at roadside inns, hostelries, and taverns, at weddings, at brawls, in brothels, in jails. I’ve heard them cheer the Inquisition, chains, freedom, the Constitution, the crown, the faith, the Revolution, death, prisons, the homeland, treason, vengeance, mercy, ignorance, absolutism, rebellion, fierce bulls, and the wine at Mass.”) “Do you think they’ll let me give him a kiss when I get there?” implored an old woman, wrapped up and sunk in a wheelchair. “Do you think . . . ?” Some Gypsies identified themselves: “We’re the Gypsies from Pozo del Tío Raimundo. For us too he was a good man.” A very old man rubbed his frozen hands and gave cavernous, intermittent coughs. “I’ve spent the whole night here, I haven’t slept, but I’m not leaving without seeing him lying in state in the palace.” Another shook his head, the lower part of his face and his ears wrapped in a scarf. “He was like a father to the country. He was like a father.” (“They not only applauded the Prince of Peace, Fernando VII, Rafael Riego, and Juan Martín the Obstinate One, but also Costillares, Pedro Romero, José Romero, Joseph Bonaparte, Murat, the duke de Angoulême, the English, and the hundred thousand Sons of Saint Louis. Now they’ll all go to the Palacio de Oriente to bid farewell to a dead man whom perhaps none of them had ever seen in the flesh. But at bottom they’re not going to the palace or anywhere else, because as I’ve always told myself when I think of them, they don’t know the way and they don’t know themselves.”)