The Valley of the Fallen

by Carlos Rojas

  “I don’t want to calm down and I don’t want God’s love. I want to survive with you and I want your love, even if it belongs to a phantom as maddened and crazed as I am! The phantom of a drunkard who killed all my children in my womb before I could conceive them! Well, whatever, let each person have his leprosy and his weeping, as whoever it was who said that, said!”

  “Marina, I beg you . . .”

  “I beg you, help me to summon R. Let’s force him to appear here, in the middle of his own dream, and oblige him to keep us alive in his book! Together we’re as strong as he is, or perhaps even more powerful. Even though we may be figures in an unfinished fable and R. may be flesh and blood, we can survive him. Isn’t it a natural law, after all, that characters outlive their authors? Is it or isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is,” Sandro murmured very quietly. “San Manuel Bueno, the priest who didn’t believe in immortality, has outlived Unamuno. But Unamuno will outlive Franco. Only the feigned is true.”

  “In that case, we can invoke R., here in his own house. What better place to request his presence? He’s the one who arranged the stage and the actors in order to make his entrance at the last minute. He was incapable only of foreseeing our rebellion, which would compel him to continue our lives when he’s prepared to abandon us. If we call him now, he won’t be able to resist, because when all is said and done, he’s only a mortal man who needs his ghosts as much as we need him.”

  “We in order to keep living and he in order not to lose his mind,” Sandro specified, almost without realizing it. “Yes, it’s very possible that all this is very true.”

  “What are we waiting for, then? If we both invoke him he’ll find himself obliged to appear, because our power will be that of the communion of the saints. Or, perhaps, do we have to wait here forever, in fiction and in reality, for the right to exist with dignity as human beings? Or do you possibly think I’m the victim of the strangest madness, that of a living woman, though incapable of giving life, who imagines she is a literary character in someone else’s book?”

  Sandro did not answer immediately. In spite of himself, he indulged in thinking about a sudden though not unexpected appearance by R., summoned by him and Marina. He would come, he thought, like Satan or the Great Goat, appearing in the oak groves of Biscay at the spells and commands of Goya’s witches. He would come if Marina was right and they really didn’t exist, to give an account not of having granted them a fictitious life (“only the feigned is true”) but of having denied them a very real freedom. Perhaps he would appear almost thirty years younger, the way he was that spring in 1947, when he introduced him and Marina beside the pond with the water lilies in the courtyard of Letters. (“How beautiful these flowers are! I wonder what they’re called” Villaespesa had exclaimed in the Retiro, according to R. “Don’t be an idiot, Villaespesa. These beautiful flowers are white water lilies that appear every day in one of your poems.”) In front of the bulletin board Falangist and Monarchist students were slapping one another. Some defended the manifesto of Don Juan de Bourbon in Estoril, which the others had not been able to rip off the board yet. “What the country desires is to emerge immediately from an increasingly dangerous temporariness, without understanding that the hostility the nation finds all around it is born for the most part of General Franco’s presence as Head of State.” Almost thirty years later, during that autumn, the nation knew once again that it was surrounded by a worldwide enemy, as a result of the five political executions in September: the last Francoist executions before the death of Franco. On the balcony of the same palace where he now lay in state, a man shrunken and cracked by age greeted with a trembling hand the delirious crowd that shouted its loyalty to him and its repudiation of the world for condemning him. For thirty-six years he had dictatorially and for life governed that country where he always found hundreds of thousands of people to applaud him. The same hundreds of thousands who would forget him very soon, as if he had never been born. When he thought of the old man and his people, Sandro told himself that neither he nor the people could be right. Their common history was a delirious dream that by contrast gave the appearance of reality to fits of madness and fictions. No one with any knowledge of those true years could accuse Marina of dementia for believing herself a character in the book of a madman.

  “No, Marina,” he said finally, “I wouldn’t imagine you possessed by the strangest kind of madness when you claim to be a phantom imagined by a man. In the final analysis, the greatest insanity will never be literature but history. On the other hand, our condition as dreamed beings is as impossible to prove as our reality. In any case, nearby or from a distance, fictitious or real, we live always governed by R. It isn’t a matter of summoning him to demand an explanation, but simply that he free us.”

  “How would we free ourselves from him? Do you know?”

  “I think so.”

  “How? For heaven’s sake! How could we do it?”

  “By making an effort to live our own lives, in the same way that this country, as true or as unreal as we are, will have to do now. Our freedom, Marina, is the measure of our existence. If yours is far from me, you can leave me tonight. I won’t try to persuade you or hold you.”

  “I have no place to go. I’ll disappear with you as soon as R. finishes his book.”

  “Perhaps the book will disappear, its destiny to remain unfinished, like the history of this country of ours, where nothing is completed and we always go back to absolute zero. In any case, whether he abandons or continues his work, a work that perhaps doesn’t even exist, I have to conclude mine.”

  “The life of Goya, which R. made you responsible for. We’re still caught in the same vicious circle.”

  “No,” Sandro replied very slowly and in a very quiet voice, “it isn’t a matter of the life of Goya that he made me responsible for. It’s a matter of writing my own life, as if I were Goya, or as if Goya were me. Tonight, when Franco is lying in state, every Spaniard is in a certain sense Goya, because we’re living the end of an Absurdity and beginning a Caprice, where our duty is the search for ourselves.”

  “Don’t forget The Disasters of War.”

  “I haven’t forgotten. Just as I remember very well that all of our contemporary history begins on May 2, 1808, under the sign of the bull. Come, help me, sit down at the typewriter.”

  Marina obeyed slowly, as if each of her steps and gestures were obeying a specific, inalienable decision. Outside, the gale grew stronger and the trees moaned and shook above the sound of the torrent and the howl of the north wind. Standing at the window, Sandro dictated in too loud a voice, as if he had become deaf. Marina hesitated for an instant, surprised in part by his voice’s timbre and tone. Then, suddenly forgetting her surprise, she began to type a dialogue that on Sandro’s lips seemed like a confession.

  “And His Majesty the king said to me:

  “‘What is your idea of happiness on earth?’

  “‘To die before my son Xavier,’ I replied immediately. ‘My wife and I had already buried the other four before I buried her too, during the starvation in the war. I don’t want to lose this one.’

  “He started to laugh without letting go of the lit cigar between his teeth, as yellow as a ram’s. He was approaching forty, or already was forty. Only when I painted him then, for the last time and by his request, did I really see how deformed his face was, heavy jawed, fat cheeked, and uneven beneath his large, deep-black brows. But his eyes, regardless of whether he had a squint, shone with a malice that was in no way dim-witted. He had been the most loved man and was the most detested, in this country that always charges when it is time to kill or reproduce . . .”

  TIMELINE

  Goya

  Timeline of Goya’s Life and Work

  March 3, 1746—Francisco de Goya Lucientes is born in the village of Fuendetodos, Saragossa.

  1760—Joins the studio of José Luzán as an apprentice. He will leave it four years later.

  1763—First tri
p to Madrid. Meets and works for the brothers Bayeu, Ramón and Francisco.

  1770–1771—Trip to Italy. In the summer of 1771 he is back in Saragossa. He is contracted to paint the vault of one chapel of El Pilar.

  1773—Marries Josefa Bayeu, the sister of Francisco and Ramón Bayeu. She will bear five children, though only the last one, Xavier, will survive his parents. All the others die in infancy.

  1774–1778—Paints cartoons for tapestries in the Real Fábrica de Santa Bárbara.

  1779—Meets His Majesty Carlos III and the so-called princes of Asturias, Don Carlos and Doña María Luisa. He is utterly charmed by the encounter. Eventually two of his portraits of young princes, in hunting attire, will be donated to the Prado by Fernando VII.

  1793—On a trip to Andalucía falls gravely ill, probably with a first attack of syphilis. The doctors save his life, but he will be stone deaf for the rest of his existence.

  1795, July or August—Probable beginning of his amorous affair with María Teresa de Alba, duchess of Alba.

  1796—Nominated president of the Section of Painting at the Academy of San Fernando. He will renounce the position in April of the following year because of his deafness.

  1797—In Sanlúcar depicts the duchess of Alba wearing mourning for her husband the late duke, and showing two rings named after her and Goya.

  1797–1798—Composes his Caprices or Caprichos. With the help of Godoy the album is published in 1799. Two other series of engravings—The Disasters of War and Los Disparates or the Absurdities—will be printed and distributed after the artist’s death.

  1798—In five or six months, with his aide Asensio Juliá, completes the frescoes of San Antonio de la Florida, where the painter’s decapitated vestiges now rest.

  1799—Elevated to the position of first painter of the royal chamber.

  1801—Paints the family of Carlos IV.

  1802—Sudden death of the duchess of Alba.

  May 2, 1808—From one of his windows, and with the help of a telescope, watches the fight of the Madrileños with the Mamelukes of Joachim Murat, marshal of France and Napoleon’s brother-in-law. In the early hours of the following day, accompanied by a young male servant, the painter sketches recently executed Madrileños at the foot of Príncipe Pío Hill. After the French defeat at Bailén, July 16–19, and the temporary lifting of the siege of Saragossa, Goya is invited to visit the city. On his trip from Madrid he sees vestiges of the atrocities committed by the invaders and the guerrillas. Added to the executions of May 3 at the foot of Príncipe Pío Hill, the crimes exposed on the road to Saragossa probably mark the beginning of The Disasters of War in the artist’s tireless creative consciousness.

  1812—In the famine of Madrid, under siege by the guerrillas, Josefa Bayeu de Goya dies. Her husband and her son Xavier attend the wake. Three years later Goya paints her portrait from memory.

  1808–1813—Though he once tries to escape to Portugal, Goya remains in Madrid almost all of this five-year period. He has a good friendship with Joseph Bonaparte and paints his portrait. Nevertheless, in 1813 he also paints the Second and the Third of May, 1808, his major masterpiece among all masterpieces, to celebrate the return of Fernando VII.

  1816—The Tauromachy appears in Madrid and sells out in a short time.

  1819—Buys the so-called Quinta del Sordo, and almost immediately begins to decorate it with the Pinturas Negras or Black Paintings. Once again contrary fate crosses his path, and another syphilis attack nearly kills him. A grateful Goya paints his self-portrait, attended by a certain doctor Arrieta.

  May 30, 1824—Fernando VII permits Goya a trip to Plombièrs “to take its medicinal waters,” though the king knows only too well that the painter intends to leave Spain for good.

  July–September, 1824—Visits Paris and meets many old friends who dwell there in exile. September 1 he travels back to Bordeaux, where he had briefly stopped on his way to Paris. In Bordeaux he is joined by his last mistress, Leocadia Weiss, and her daughter Rosarito, who is rumored to have been sired by Goya.

  1826–1827—Briefly travels to Madrid twice. He intends to solicit a retirement annuity and to add a clause to his will leaving Marianito, his grandson, la Quinta del Sordo. The annuity is immediately granted. Leocadia and Rosarito are not even mentioned in the painter’s last testament.

  April 16, 1828—Dies in Bordeaux.

  Franco

  Excerpts from a Timetable of Franco’s Last Days

  November 7, 1975—With the patient suffering a gastric hemorrhage and unresponsive to medical treatment, a new operation is decided upon. (Franco had been operated on at El Pardo in deplorable circumstances. In the midst of a furious storm, even the electricity went off, and it took a long while to come back on.) His Excellency the Chief of State is moved to “La Paz” Hospital Complex and immediately placed in the care of surgeons, anesthetists, and four cardiorespiratory supervisors. The operation reveals many ulcers of the stomach, which were bleeding profusely. The gastric surgery lasts four hours, and requires five more liters of blood. The vital signs are normal, but the prognosis is very grave.

  November 8, 1975—At 8:30 a.m. the clinical evolution of His Excellency the Chief of State is as follows: he has slept almost through the night, though he awoke from anesthesia at 3 a.m. and was sedated to avoid any pain. His vital signs, his cardiocirculatory situation, and the thrombophlebitic process in his left thigh remain normal. From the beginning of yesterday’s surgical operation to this moment he has received seven liters and two hundred milliliters of blood by transfusion. (It was said that by the time of his death not a drop of Franco’s own blood was in his body.)

  November 14, 1975—At 3:30 p.m. His Excellency the Generalissimo presents acute arterial hypotension, an increase in venous pressure, and an abdominal distension, caused by a probable deficiency in suturing. After a decision for immediate intervention, a recent dehiscence, related to shock, is confirmed at the gastrojejunal anastomosis. After the dehiscent zone is sutured again, drains are placed in the abdominal cavity. The intervention lasts two hours and is satisfactorily tolerated, but the prognosis is extremely grave.

  November 15, 1975—At 9:00 a.m. arterial and venous pressure is constant, rhythm and frequency of the pulse are acceptable. The pulmonary situation remains stable, with respiration assisted. A session of hemodialysis is well tolerated. The prognosis continues to be extremely grave.

  November 20, 1975—Franco dies. Multiple causes of death are listed as peritonitis, Parkinson’s disease, renal dysfunction, stomach ulcers, heart stoppage, etc., etc. His perishing is attributed to almost any mortal illness except cancer, and a cynical joke adds that he had killed his cancer when he was in the throes of death. Poor cancer!

  CARLOS ROJAS is a novelist, an art historian, and since the age of fifty a creator of visual works of art. He was born in Barcelona and came to the United States as a young man. In 1960 he joined the faculty of Emory University, where he is now Charles Howard Candler Professor of Spanish Literature, Emeritus. He has received numerous important Spanish literary prizes, including the Premio Cervantes. He lives in Atlanta.

  EDITH GROSSMAN has translated major contemporary and classic authors, including Carlos Rojas, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Álvaro Mutis, Luis de Góngora, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Miguel de Cervantes. Both Carlos Fuentes and Harold Bloom have praised her version of Don Quixote (Ecco, 2003) as one of the best in English.