The Oldest Confession

by Richard Condon

  Whereas few honest people can understand, Bourne would explain to Eve, why a man would marshal such an organization of faculties and reactions for such an essentially juvenile feat, which it would be if it had been performed under ideal conditions and for small profit, almost any criminal mind would warm to a description of Bourne’s accomplishment in the execution of these three jobs over so wearying a course, and be able to elaborate on Bourne’s work the way cunning folk refight the battles of the American Civil War by mail and in the way many honest folk are able to extrapolate the complex motivations of the entirely secret lives of their fellows from merely a few and, in most cases, even misleading pieces of gossip.

  Bourne was in bed, and asleep, forty-two minutes after he had started. He was asleep when dawn put an eye over the edge of the world and, like many a bright business executive, began again the precise duplication of its own existence.

  Mr. Pickett started the morning with the Goya quote, which meant he would make this his text for the day, which went: “I had three masters: Velázquez, Rembrandt and Nature.” Dr. Muñoz began his textual counterpoint which was an unrelievedly tedious description of his visit to Fuendetodos, Goya’s birthplace.

  Mr. Pickett discussed Goya with his accustomed brilliance. Dr. Muñoz listened at first attentively then with growing strain. His right hand, which had been patting the cat Montes, who was a golden bunch on his lap, increased its tempo, stroking the cat faster and faster. The words trundled out of Mr. Pickett’s throat with lumbering grace, every fourth or fifth word stabbed treacherously with the pointed end of an italic. “I most certainly would say that beginning with 1814 and the restoration of Ferdinand to the Spanish throne, Goya began to paint his most thrilling, most brutal and most exhilarating paintings.”

  Dr. Muñoz spat.

  “Why did you spit?”

  “For Goya!”

  “You spit on Goya?” Mr. Pickett’s hand rose to his breast as though to ward off an evil spirit.

  Dr. Muñoz’ dark face was flushed darker by a rush of blood. “Goya is why I am a poor man today. If there had been no Goya I would have had more than you, more than the duchess, more than most in this world.”

  Mr. Pickett gasped, “How is that?”

  Dr. Muñoz poked an insistent finger into his own chest. “My ancestors financed Pizarro. Francisco Pizarro. It brought us twenty per cent of all the Inca gold. I would have had whatever paintings in the world I wanted for my own. They would have been hanging on every wall of every house I chose to build, wherever I would build. You would have had to come to me to ingratiate yourself to learn from me about the Spanish masters. I could have journeyed anywhere to buy back the Spanish masters from the museums to bring them back to Spain where they belong, in my houses. I would have had more than anyone, more than you. I would have owned more than the Prado, more even than the churches because everything I would have possessed would have gone to the paintings. What do you know of a love of Spanish art? What can you feel of the destiny of the Spanish masters? You read books and you write again what you have read! Can you love the history of our art as Cayetano loves Blanca de Dos Cortes? Can you turn yourself into a Spaniard whose ancient lines employed these masters as one employs a cook? Bah!” He leaned forward as though he were thinking of striking Representative Pickett. “Bah!”

  Mr. Pickett was fascinated. True, he had recoiled at first, but this promised, really, to be too much to miss.

  “Well! You must tell me about it!” he said softly, reeling with the gossip value of what must certainly come, appraising it as dinner conversation with a part of his mind knowing that he would be asked everywhere once he had patterned the exact responses effectively and polished the climaxes worth for worth. “Good heavens! Goya! I never dreamed!”

  “Pizarro, for one. In addition to that my family took two merchantmen filled with gold bullion from the British at the time when the king was so indebted to us that he refused to take more than a tithe and protected us from losing too great a share to the church as well. Did you know we controlled one third of the trade in Cuba for one hundred and six years? My family goes back to Pedro. We are over a thousand years old. Look about you. We are here at Dos Cortes. How old are they?” He laughed gratingly and bitterly. “Three hundred and two years!” He had to spin away from his baleful stare at Mr. Pickett to regain control of himself. He tried to speak in a less choked and more measured manner. “This duke is a degenerate. How old is the duchess’s line? Only eight hundred and ninety-two years, although they have been a great family, too. But Blanca is the first—I say to you that Blanca is the first—to show any interest in the art of Spain. She is interested because I have taught her. Yet the walls of this small castle are rich with the masters while my walls are blessed to have paper copies in fractions of size!”

  Tentatively, as a naturalist might approach a bird in a garden hoping desperately not to frighten it and see it fly away, Mr. Pickett murmered, “But what of Goya? You spoke of Goya actually costing you this fortune or perhaps should I say this opportunity in art.”

  Dr. Muñoz had regained control. He was embarrassed. “Really, Pickett. You must forgive me, you know. Really. My conduct is unsupportable. You see, I didn’t sleep well last night, at all. I have been so stimulated by our talks and by the presence of the masters on the other side of the very wall of my chamber, and I do apologize. Please say you forgive me.”

  “Forgive you? Nonsense! There is nothing to forgive. My dear man! I mean, well, you know how I would adore to catch such an unknown and unexpected glimpse of Goya. Why, it sounds positively melodramatic, in the best and most goyaesque sense of that overused word I mean, of course. Please don’t stop now due to some fanciful, impossible reason that you have offended me! I am dying to hear this entire saga. Imagine—Pizarro, pirates, a line of over a thousand years. It is all really too much, you know.”

  Dr. Muñoz was distinctly flattered. He indulged in a brief smile. “You see, in a word, Goya was a police spy. He was the lowest sort, really he was, Pickett. My family, for excellent reasons, worked from within Spain to bring about the abdication of Charles IV.” Dr. Muñoz spoke as though he, personally, were as adjacent to that king as Harry Daugherty had been to the late Warren Gamaliel Harding. “We elected to prepare our country for Napoleon because he stood for a new era. We supported Joseph Bonaparte and progress. Our decision was taken publicly and honorably. Goya’s decision was taken craftily and opportunistically. He had a genius for treachery, I can tell you. He pretended to support Bonaparte, oh yes indeed. He even painted his portrait, as you know. He painted an endless succession of French generals. He was the chairman of the committee which selected the group of Spanish masterpieces for Napoleon’s collection in the Louvre! Oh, yes. Nothing was too good for the Bonapartes. They were his idols, his rulers, his liege lords! Bah!” Dr. Muñoz paused to spit. He shook his head as though he disapproved of himself for doing such a thing, but the disapproval must have been entirely for Francisco Goya, because he spat again.

  “A turncoat, sir! A dog of a rotten turncoat! When Wellington entered Madrid in 1814, Goya’s first move, after becoming a police spy and Wellington’s fawning portraitist, was to impeach my family, to have us turned out by the British cutthroats, to have our estates and fortunes and world of paintings by the greatest”—he waved his arm in a wild sweeping gesture—“Spanish masters confiscated by Ferdinand VII. He was an informer. A cheap police informer. That is why I spit on Paco Goya!” He looked out over the parapet. His face was quite flushed and it appeared that only the greatest effort and grimacing were keeping him from weeping. Representative Pickett respected his distress with soaring inner joy. This was simply priceless! To have this absurd little man, and even though he was a marqués and a grandee of Spain he was an absurd little man, reach the point of tears of rage over Francisco Goya, and to have the absolute gall to call him Paco as though he were referring to the Spanish Diamond Jim Brady, was heaven on toast! But Mr. Pickett kept a solemn, lo
ng face. Dr. Muñoz succeeded in not weeping. He refilled their tiny cups with coffee and spoke in a low, shaking voice. “He was also, of course, one of the greatest masters of painting that the world has ever known and his paintings will be forever treasured into an eternity of glory for Spain.”

  “You are quite right in that connection, my dear doctor,” Mr. Pickett said. He put a match to a large cigar and the two men fell to musing silently about art.

  The group enjoyed four stimulating days, each in his own way. The first day began, immediately after breakfast, with a lecture tour of all of the paintings in Dos Cortes. Mr. Pickett was enthralled. He said he would have traveled twice round the world to see such Spanish paintings. He reserved special reverence for Jean Marie’s copy of the Velázquez which Bourne had placed in the frame so much earlier in the day. Bourne watched and listened with outwardly grave composure. It had been a bad half hour as they had worked their way toward the Velázquez. Mr. Pickett’s talk at each other painting had seemed interminable. When he had finally drawn the group under the Velázquez by Jean Marie, Bourne suddenly discovered that he had been holding his breath. As he exhaled, his eyes darted to the group standing on both sides of him, but they were absorbed in what Mr. Pickett was feeling about this particular masterpiece, by what he assured them was the greatest painter Spain, or indeed perhaps all civilization, had ever produced. The humor of Mr. Pickett’s extravagance, coming as it did, in his opening remarks, cheered Bourne greatly and permitted him to relax and enjoy the rest of the congressman’s authoritative treatise.

  After his sweepingly generous opening, Mr. Pickett moved in with some of his famous technical observations; trenchant, omniscient and frequently witty. He reminded them that Dostoevski had called Velázquez “a species of eternity within the space of a square foot.” He proceeded to offer them some of it.

  “You see the back only of that long, lithe body, lissome as a hazel wand and stretching with Andalusian indolence. You’ll notice that Velázquez was not the man to distract the beholder with two focuses. He is simply and entirely engrossed with the loveliness of flesh in light. Ah, mercy! Look at the rhythm and the modeling of that figure! Surely some goddess guided that hand which gave us this utter, utter beauty. See the transparent shadows that lurk where the lower curves of the back and leg slide into the drapes, glimmering with reflected lights? I am now going to say something to you quite entirely conscious of the solemn responsibility I hold unto the Spanish nation and the world of art. I will tell you that although I say it now for the first time I will say it again and again as long as the Lord preserves me, and I will write it and sign my name to it and cause it to be published wherever art is courted that this Velázquez nude is lovelier than the hitherto loveliest of all nudes in the history of art. I speak of the Rokeby Venus by the same Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, the great and before this day in my life, this red letter day in my life, incomparable as it now hangs in the National Gallery of London. My friends, before us here today, enriching us forever through the riot of memory, I say to you that this Dos Cortes Velázquez is the greatest single nude ever painted, across all of the pages of man’s great art.”

  Dr. Muñoz shivered in ecstasy as he heard for the first time a new Mr. Pickett, the parliamentarian Pickett, Congressman Homer Pickett, (R., Ill.). The orator’s face shone with the glory which would begin with the publication of the article already forming in his mind in Art, Things And You. He would cable ahead to the New York Times. He would change his plans and arrive by boat, not by plane, so that the reporters could have time with him and the many photographs he would take in a large and comfortable stateroom. What a buzz this would cause and how absolutely just it would be! How could he have waited so many long years through a life devoted to the art of Spain to have finally seen this magnificent, incomparable, enchanting masterpiece? He had a great deal more to say, to which he, himself, listening very carefully, taking notes as it were against the polishing days aboard the ship when he could begin to set the words down on paper. How very, very fulfilling art could be, he thought as he talked. Cayetano grew bored after forty minutes of it. He wandered off to the little bar and poured himself a cognac.

  The four days moved with much leisure, culture and comfort. Mrs. Pickett, to her surprise, stumbled over a selection of Spanish brandies which were excellent. She spent much of the four days dabbling and experimenting, then taking her siesta for five hours each afternoon, so as never to be tardy for each evening’s program of listening to the others. When she did have a chance to talk she talked bullfighting to Cayetano and Bourne, conceding its exhilarating qualities but frankly stating that she could not abide pointless cruelty which did nothing but underscore, in a shameful way, the essential morbidity of the Spanish people. The men agreed with her gravely.

  Cayetano and the duchess continued to express each other with gentle patience although they were seldom closer than four feet to each other, never further away than five. Bourne thought that if their hands should touch or their shoulders brush by accident or by earthquake those in the room would be eternally blinded by the fire the contact would produce, but Bourne being a criminal, was a romantic, which is to say, under the majority definition, a faulty measure offering ten inches to the foot, or fourteen, but never the standard, accurate twelve.

  Bourne still felt the pressure of having concealed his friend’s property in his effects and frequently sat up with a start to worry whether a servant might have blundered upon it, then realized that he had it held under a stout lock. What might have seemed to have been sighs were not. He had to take deep breaths, then hold the breaths, as part of the control he sought to maintain. No one was aware of the tension he felt. Rather, perhaps Cayetano was because he was sensitive to Bourne, being his friend, but if he was it was in a most vague manner and therefore nothing he could attempt to correct.

  Bourne used up the first afternoon composing a telegram in code to Jean Marie who was in Paris. After that he disappeared into the library because, in his specialized way, he was as enthusiastic about books as the congressman was about pictures. The Dos Cortes library was a rich one. On the third day he found exactly what he had hoped to find; a great volume containing virtual inventories of the art collections of small churches and large houses together with set upon set of precise floor plans. He made a mental note to ask Dr. Muñoz about the names. He would surely know these people and through him Bourne could easily wangle week-end invitations. It had been by that identical route that he had met the duchess. He borrowed the congressman’s camera and film without mentioning it and photographed many of the pages. The activity made him smile wryly as he remembered a summer, twenty-eight years before, when he had struggled and studied to win the Photography Merit Badge which had elevated him to the rank of Star Scout in the Boy Scouts of America.

  That evening at dinner Mr. Pickett had come bursting in wildly excited with news about the Velázquez. Bourne felt the blood strike into his head, he had to grasp both arms of the chair for, although sitting, a dizziness severe enough to nearly send him over sideways rushed into his head with the massive heat of the blood. Mr. Pickett’s words cured him.

  “This is absolutely incredible!” Mr. Pickett cried and all eyes were swung into his course as he dashed into the room. “I have been staring at that wonderful Velázquez trying to find out, as a scientist would try, what it was which gave the painting its transcendent glory. I peered. I studied. I absorbed. Then, all at once it came to me. I knew. I tell you I knew. And, because of your kindness in bringing me to the presence of this masterpiece, I am going to break a rule of long standing with relationship to my art scoops and share it all with you.” He smiled at them like the bountiful father in the automobile advertisements. The duchess and Bourne, then the duchess and Cayetano, exchanged quick perplexed glances. Mrs. Pickett stared at the bridge of her husband’s nose and thought of a certain shoe salesman who had absolutely fondled her foot in Minneapolis seven years before. Dr. Muñoz quivered. He qu
ivered and blinked. He quivered and blinked and fluttered as he waited for Mr. Pickett to explode the bombshell.

  “You will all recall,” Mr. Pickett said, a substantial platform manner now assumed, “that stimulating event in the life of Velázquez, the visit of Rubens to Madrid in 1628 and 1629, on a diplomatic mission from the Stadtholder Isabella, which was quite possibly connected with negotiations for concluding peace between England and Spain.”

  Dr. Muñoz raised his hand. With the slightest show of irritation, Mr. Pickett recognized him and, for an instant, turned over the floor. “May I say in passing,” asked Dr. Muñoz, “that a full account of the activities of Rubens in Spain is given by Pacheco in his book?”

  “Well! I think everyone here knows that, Victoriano,” Mr. Pickett stated acidly.

  “Oh, yes. Of course. Please excuse me. Do go on.”

  Mr. Pickett sniffed. “It has been said that a change is to be observed in the style of Velázquez subsequent to the visit of Rubens, that brought about a new and all-pervading light and color to his paintings. Now—and please bear with me—this is to be a very, very thrilling moment for each of you and one which you may never forget. There is an entry in the Palace Archives for July 1629 in which Velázquez is credited with one hundred ducats—I quote—‘on account of a picture of Troilus which he has made in my service.’ The Troilus, as it was colloquially called, was painted under the very eyes of Rubens.” Mr. Pickett shot his pointing finger onward and upward across the great hall, in direct indication to the painting by Jean Marie. The official title of this painting was “Nude Spring.” He peered at his listeners hypnotically and his flutelike voice went staccato. “Although Velázquez went on to become a far, far greater painter than Rubens, it is to be doubly honored to sit beneath the very painting which contains the divinity of both great men.” He sank into a chair, too weak by his discovery to support himself. His voice sounded hoarse. “I am prepared to submit an affadavit which will swear that, in my opinion, my humble opinion, that as a cosmic jest, both Velázquez and Rubens, rather in the manner of a tap dancing ‘challenge contest’ of old-time vaudeville, painted that picture. Whatever its value before this discovery, I can assure you, my dear duchess, it has doubled now, which value I am prepared to assess in the article I shall write upon the subject for Art, Things And You.”