The Oldest Confession

by Richard Condon

  They led the paseo forward. The three matadors followed behind them in a line abreast, with their cuadrillas filing after them. Cayetano, as senior matador, marched on the extreme left. César Girón, cockier than any marcher who has ever strutted, was on the extreme right, his right elbow cocked almost as high as his shoulder as he came across in his own distinctive marching style. Sanchez, heavily handsome, dedicatedly sullen and solid, marched in the middle.

  Cayetano wore a suit of burnished silver, the masses of it crusted and heavy, over lavender silk and he looked, perhaps, as blithe, as brave and as beautiful as the duchess thought he looked. They marched as they had taken their lines on the cartel outside the plaza and Cayetano would fight the first bull which Don Salvador would send out. Behind the three bravos came forty-two banderilleros, puntilleros, picadores, monosabios and mulillas. Each line as they completed the full cross acknowledged the presence of the president and the matadors moved left to their burladero where Cayetano winked at the duchess but did not move into the callejon to speak to her because he had the first bull. His mozo de espada spread his cape before her just as he turned away. His peons took their positions behind the two other burladeros, the bugle sounded, the toril gate swung clear and the bull came crashing out into the ring.

  For the same reason that the carteles for this fight had to be reprinted eleven times within the next month to become eventually a standard item for the tourists, no one can say whether it was a good fight, an indifferent fight, a dull fight or a triumph of honor and of skill. Naturally, the newspapers said it was the greatest single lidia that Jiminez had ever fought and the people who were there said it was even greater than that until it became tauromaquia beyond the capabilities of any man who ever lived or who will ever live. However, what they said was the only possible judgment.

  After the banderillas had been placed, Cayetano walked to the place in the ring beneath the president’s box and, with his montera in his right hand, made the formal request of the president to kill the bull. Then he walked in that slow, self-assured way of his for about twenty-five yards to stand directly in front of the duchess. He brindised to her with great solemnity, dedicating with the words “Va por ti” then breaking into his dazzling, boyish smile looking deep into her eyes and making her feel weak and stirred. He wheeled, tossed his montera over his shoulder into the stands for the duchess, then signaled to his peons to bring the bull from the far corner of sol y sombra to the section of the ring directly in front of Tendido Two, far to the left of the duchess. While he waited for them to bring the bull into place for the faena, Cayetano caught Dr. Muñoz’ eye, and winked. The marqués grinned happily and winked back.

  The magnificent Guardiola bull was an asarajado which meant that his skin was as tawny as a lion’s. It was an extremely brave bull who charged straight each time the lure called him. It followed the capotes of the peons obediently across the ring and was lined up for the twists of Cayetano’s muleta economically and well.

  The faena was a blur of movement and sound and pain afterwards; then it became blank to remain blank as though there was no room for it in any of the twenty-one thousand memories which had witnessed it. As Cayetano started his faena with a derechazo, which is a natural pass with the right hand and which is extremely moving in its simplicity, Dr. Muñoz left his seat in contra barrera and walked to the stairway, immediately behind him, which lead to the chute which lead to the street. Mrs. Pickett did not seem to be with him. Cayetano, passing the fine bull at the very peak of his art, took the blankets of clear separate “Olés!” which slapped down upon his linked passes with blithe pleasure, and grinned with sheer joy through the complete and absolute silence which the twenty-one thousand people presented to him between that organized, deliberate thunder. Everyone was forward on the edge of his seat. The guardias at the steps at the mouth of the chute were standing far forward, rapt with the scene of the man and the bull. The chute was covered. The guardias did not see Dr. Muñoz as he passed them nor did they see him as he stood on the deserted steps, the long knife in his hand at his side, looking out at Cayetano from behind them.

  Cayetano squared the bull, profiled, then went in to kill, crossing his muleta and hitting the huge bull exactly true between the shoulder blades. As he was framed between the horns, Dr. Muñoz threw his knife. It rolled lazily through the air, end over end, needing only to travel fifteen yards to hit Cayetano directly between the shoulders. He sagged over the bull as the bull sagged under him, blood leaving both of them in gobbets.

  They died together.

  At four thirty-six Bourne left the Sala Goya and walked along the corridor. He was half the distance to the nearest guard on duty when he heard a great shout. He stopped. He saw the guard stare straight ahead of him, saw him strain to listen, then saw him bolt and run out of sight. Bourne wheeled and proceeded rapidly into the Sala Goya, shouting in English and pointing over his shoulder. Jean Marie leaped to his feet and began to shout in French, pointing in the same direction. The three Arabs stared at them blankly, startled in a fixed freize which scattered and ran out of the room in the opposite direction from which Bourne had pointed.

  Neither man spoke. They walked to the mother frame and slipped the framed copy out of its hiding place and dragged it to the wall before the “Milkmaid of Bordeaux” where they propped it up, facing the wall. Jean Marie went stolidly to his corner of “The Second of May” as it hung on the wall, counting under his breath as he moved. Bourne waited at his corner. He made the first three snips with his bolt cutter. He set up the stepladder. He climbed the three steps, unhurriedly. He made two snips. He stepped down daintily. He picked up the ladder and moved in the outside lane to Jean Marie’s corner, while Jean Marie, counting as he went, moved to his. Bourne completed his work on the far side of the painting moving exactly as he had moved through forty-nine drills, through the precise plans which he had held in his mind and which he had sketched and studied on graphed paper.

  The crowd rioted at the bull ring as soon as the realization that what had happened before their eyes had really happened. Two children and one woman were trampled to death; twenty-six persons were injured, nine seriously. Two men, seated sixty yards apart in separate sections of the plaza, had been pointed at as having thrown the knife but miraculously had been saved from the mob by courageous police. Thousands of people looked up at the sky, seeking God, and wept. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds in every section of the stands stood or sat where they had been and remained there, huddled and numb, staring out at the spot on the sand where he had been murdered, tears streaming down their faces. They stayed there, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, long after darkness came. The Patio de Caballos overflowed with thousands of people just standing in silence outside the chapel where he would be laid. The streets were choked with mobs. Houses, cafés, stores and cars had emptied. People moved through the streets all during the night. They set up a vigil, nine thousand of them, outside the police headquarters. They set up vigils, hundreds and hundreds, outside the neighborhood police stations. Madrid had been canted, her people cascading mindlessly down its sides in a mass, agonized hopelessness of rage and loss.

  Dr. Muñoz had told the strict truth in his note to Bourne in saying that it would be an extraordinarily successful diversion.

  Bourne and Jean Marie each held the great painting by a corner and by its side as they staggered backward with it to the mother frame. Just as they reached it, two elderly American tourists, a man and a woman, walked slowly past in the corridor outside the entrance to the room and stared directly at Jean Marie, registering absolutely nothing, not even seeing what they saw because they were looking for religious paintings by Bartholomé Estaban Murillo, and passed on.

  Jean Marie only knew that they stared at his guilt, had seen him while he stole, had documented his fear and had realized his nightmares. He did not slow down his movement. He did not comment. He merely dropped his corner of the painting and ran. He ran without thought, without hop
e of escape. He ran and left Bourne and the Goya and the mother frame and the trompe l’oeil and the huge identical copy which had so pleased Dr. Muñoz.

  Bourne watched him go, but could not cry out after him because he was engulfed with despair. It was as if a chained man sat at the edge of a ferryboat while the wind blew all of his life savings out of a hat at his feet and he could see the money, the green, paper money, float down the river toward the sea in the moonlight. But his mind reacted, that motor part of it, as it had been trained to react; his reflexes bearing the fruits of the discipline which he had put himself to over so many years. With his height and because of his great strength, he managed to lift the bottom edge of the Goya into the mother frame, but then it slipped and crashed upon the floor. He lifted again, straining in agony, and got it placed more solidly this time. He pushed one corner home, then slowly traversed the length of it, securing it into the mother frame and this time it held. He tapped it methodically all around its periphery to make sure it was secure, then he picked up his smart, dark blue homburg hat, by Gelot of the Place Vendôme, from the floor and strolled leisurely out of the room, using the exit opposite the one which Jean Marie had run through, wiping his hands on his handkerchief as he went. En route to the gate on the Paseo, he paused with some Swedish tourists to appreciate El Greco, exactly on schedule.

  He reached the door of his hotel room at ten minutes after five o’clock. Eve told him Cayetano had been murdered.

  By ten minutes after five the police and other security officers had sealed off the Sala Goya and its approaches from the rest of the Prado. The six guards of that wing were lined up against the far wall of that room, faced by nine police officers of high rank. Six extraordinary security officers were present. Four representatives of the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica, including its young, stout director who held the assimilated rank of under-secretary of state. With him were the Director of the Museo del Prado with two Goya experts. They were grouped about Jean Marie’s copy as it stood propped so incongruously against the wall under the great bare spot, looking as though the original had slipped from its moorings and had slid to the floor.

  Each of the twenty-seven men in the room were whey-faced with shock and anxiety. The experts had just finished agreeing, as impossible as it sounded, that because of the quality of pigment, the age of canvas, and the wood across the back of its frame this representation before them which had to be “The Second of May” by Francisco Goyay Lucientes was not that painting and while they did their best to cope with this obscene enigma they tried to ask themselves, then the police experts, for the smokiest wisp of an idea as to where the original could have disappeared.

  Behind them, at room center, as bulky as a battleship, stood the great false frame which seemed to hold only the triptych of the three copies of the Goyas on a single canvas.

  Guard after guard confined the story that for three weeks a man known as Charles Smadja had wheeled the great frame into this room, as indeed they had assisted him day after day, to work under official museum permit to copy the three Goyas. They were told to test it for weight, and man after man insisted that the weight was exactly the same as it had always been.

  With these points established the police asked the Director of the Museo del Prado who turned to ask his assistant who turned in his turn to ask his assistant to have the museum permit explained. The police learned that the permit had been issued to accommodate Dr. Victoriano Muñoz, the Marqués de Villalba.

  The triptych was ordered impounded by the police. A police van carried it to a police warehouse where it was ticketed, crated and wrapped in strong, brown paper. The Goya painting called “The Second of May” was even more concealed from the eyes of its host, the Spanish state.

  Part III

  APLOMADO

  The bull is tired. His flanks are heaving and his breath is short. His speed is cut, but he is determined to use his horns on something solid. He is beginning to think there is something not quite right about the lure. He must be killed quickly now, respecting both his tiredness and his intelligence.

  That the art of Cayetano Jiminez was as impermanent as Nijinsky’s or Booth’s inasmuch as it could live on, in reality, only as long as an individual physical performance lasted or as long as the memory of its last living witness, in fantasy, made it no less a great art and perhaps a greater one for while their genius had to remain interpretive his had been summoned out of death, not unlike Picasso drawing in the air with electric lights in both hands; art only while you could see it, but undeniably creative.

  That his courage had been fixed by the ritual of the corrida, a choreography repeated since the beginning of man’s practice of contempt for death in this form, made it no less gallant nor less formidable than any other human’s exploration into any other unknown. The term unknown throughout man’s fix in time has been framed within the relatively known, while the unknown hinted at by death has been obfuscated by the wishful thinking or threats of priests and bounded on all sides by the unseen visions of basilica saints and the professional conjectures of martyrs.

  What follows appeared on the leading page of Spain’s national newspaper on the day following Cayetano’s death.

  The shocking and senseless murder of Cayetano Jiminez in the full light of day within the arena of the Plaza of Bulls of Madrid yesterday closed a glorious cycle and presented the memory with an accumulation of feats, of enobling passion, of art and wisdom, in all of which he played a leading role. Cayetano Jiminez was above all else the dominating figure, the axis of an epoch, the antenna around which revolved the turbulence of the fiesta. To trace his memory is both easy and complicated. It is easy because to some it would be enough to say that he was the greatest fighter of all time. It is complicated because to characterize him in every moment of the evolution of his art and in every trace of his style is a project more than arduous. His outstanding quality was without a doubt his vocation for the profession to which he gave himself without reservation from the time he was thirteen years old, as his illustrious ancestors had given on a like basis for the past one hundred and twenty-three years of the corrida. This was the killer of bulls who passed rapidly through the arenas, obtaining the highest consideration that any master could dream of, to die grotesquely as though death had donned the ruby nose of a clown at a murderer’s hand at the age of twenty-seven in his full glory, without knowing the pain of failure, without showing the slightest symptom of decadence. It can thus be said that however heinous his passing and however exemplary his life, his death was transcendent in its completion of a cycle without a fault, with mythical perfection.

  Bourne could not seem to unclench his fists or to unknot his jaws when he was not speaking. Eve could not seem to take her eyes off Bourne. Her beauty had been paled by the shock of the news of Cayetano’s death and more so by the raving, drunken, mumbling, guilt-ridden, immobile, grief-ripped Bourne it had produced. The paleness she emanated was contrasted and colored by the gray-greenness of her large, dismayed eyes; by her glistening, full, red mouth and by her lush, shining body under the green Japanese kimona which she held around herself loosely, partially open over her nakedness. She sat there trying to will Bourne to look at her body. She wanted to make him use her body as an anodyne, to drive himself into it so that the pain and growing hopelessness could be driven out of him.

  Bottles, ice buckets, glasses, pitchers, cigarette stubs, snarled used cigarette packages, thick smoke, broken fragments of food and wet heat pocked the room. Bourne had slumped forward into the unapproachable drunkenness of an enormous man, his hands dangling between his legs knotted into fists at the level of his ankles, his meaty shoulders low, his head sunken into his chest, staring at the floor. Whenever he spoke brokenly about the duchess or Cayetano he had to shut his eyes.

  It was nine forty-five of the morning of the first day following Cayetano’s murder. For the two hundredth time Bourne mumbled, “I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”

  Eve moved slowly across t
he room. The robe fell open. She stood directly in front of him, her rounded, opalescent stomach at the level of his bent head until he looked up, then she sat on the sofa beside him. Her breasts pushed out. They were full and high and had nipples like thumbs. She pulled him over to rest on her as he canted off his rump at a crazy angle, holding him.

  “It will all be settled today,” she said, “you’ll settle it all today.”

  “But I can’t find him!”

  “We’ll find him. You’ll see. We’ll find him today.” Bourne had telephoned Muñoz nearly forty times in fifteen hours but there had been no answer.

  Eve turned his head with her right shoulder and with her right hand urged his face into her breasts, offering them as sanctuary.

  “I was only trying to get what was mine,” Bourne muttered. “I worked for three years for it. How could I know what he was going to do?”

  “You were right, darling. You did right.”

  “That butler fills the door and keeps saying ‘no, Señor, the duchess is not here’ when all the while she’s writhing on a bed upstairs with the cords of her neck bursting from her throat while she says the word why over and over and over again.”

  “You’ll see her today. And you’ll see Muñoz today. You’ll drag him to Blanca and you’ll make him tell her what he did and make him tell her how you didn’t know,” she crooned.

  “That’s what I’ll do. That’s what I’ll do today.” He struggled to get up, but she held him close to her. “I’m going to get dressed now.”

  “Sleep first,” she said. “Go to sleep, my dearest, go to sleep.” He lay still upon her and she began to pray that they could both be turned to stone.

  Not only the Spanish press saw the truth in Cayetano from the perspective of his death. Time, the American news magazine, recorded his passing with these words: