The next room was dominated largely by German art. It contained Dürer’s famous self-portrait, as well as his ‘Adam’ and his ‘Eve.’ However, my eye was caught at once by a long narrow painting I had been familiar with since childhood, when, as was only normal, it had shocked and filled me with a degree of fear tinged with curiosity, ‘The Three Ages and Death’ by Hans Baldung Grien, which, like the two portraits, has its counterpart in another painting of the same format and dimensions next to it,‘Harmony, or The Three Graces.’ In the former, Death, on the right, is grasping the arm of an old woman or has his arm linked through hers and is tugging at her gently, unhurriedly, and the old woman, in turn, has one arm round the shoulder of a young woman while with her left hand she’s plucking at the younger woman’s skimpy raiments, as if she, too, were drawing her softly away. Death is carrying an hourglass in his right hand (‘An hourglass figure,’ I thought) and in his left hand keeps a loose hold on a spear twice broken (it almost resembles a thunderless flash of lightning) on whose point falls or rests the hand of a sleeping child who is lying at the feet of that group of three, though it may be a long time until he joins them, and he is quite oblivious to their dealings. To his right, an owl; in the background, a solar landscape that looks instead lunar, grim and desolate, with a ruined tower in flames; the inevitable cross hangs in the sky. I had always wondered, ever since I was a child, if the young woman and the old were the same person at very different ages or if they were two separate women, I mean, if the older woman had always been tugging at herself from youth onwards and into old age, when she finally allows herself to be carried off by Death, for if that were not the case, the subject would be graver and more troubling. However, the two women looked very alike to me: the blue eyes, the nose, the rather thin lips, the somewhat sharp chin, the long wavy hair, the stature, the smallish widely-spaced breasts, the feet, the whole figure, there were even similarities in their facial expressions, or at least they were not entirely opposed. The young woman is frowning, either worried or annoyed, but not alarmed or frightened, as she probably would have been had the person drawing her away been a stranger, or just another person, or even her mother. She doesn’t struggle or put up a fight or try to shrug off the hand on her shoulder, and at most, she tries to prevent her from removing all her garments. The old woman, for her part, focuses all her attention on the young woman and not on Death, and in her look there is a mixture of gravity, understanding, resolve and pity, but no ill will, as if she were saying to the young woman (or to herself when she was her age): ‘I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do’ (or ‘Come along, we have to go on; I know because I’ve already arrived’). As for Death, who has his arm linked through hers, she takes no notice of him, but neither does she resist or oppose him, she looks more towards the past than her future, perhaps because—despite the promises of the cross hanging in the air and the infernal tower in flames, with a large hole in the side as if made by a cannon ball—she knows that there is little or no future left.
‘There’s Sir Death,’ I thought, ‘as in the English and, generally speaking, the Germanic tradition: he’s clearly male, el Muerte not la Muerte, because although he is cadaverous, a semi-skeleton with the skin clinging to bones it barely covers—like a disguise he’s adopted to tread the earth, all the more so when you notice his eyes are more deeply sunken than the rest—you can see a few wisps of beard growing out of his chin, and other wisps, resembling tiny tentacles, more like the tentacles of a cuttlefish or a squid than an octopus, peeping out where his penis and his vanished testicles would have been, now there’s only a hole where once a codpiece doubtless stood erect. He’s certainly not like Sergeant Death in the Armagh ballad (“And when Sergeant Death’s cold arms shall embrace me”), who is a man in his prime, a strong energetic warrior prepared to snatch lives away nonstop, an experienced professional with his cold disciplined arms always busy; this Death is the feeblest and most worn of the three figures, or of the four, with his meek broken spear, so meek that an unwary child can almost touch it. And yet there is determination and energy in the scrawny arm that grips, and he is, above all, the master of time, he holds the clock and knows the time and can see when it’s running out, the sand or water, whichever it is that his hourglass contains and on which his red-veined eyes are firmly fixed, rather than on the old or the young woman, for time is his only guide, the only thing that counts for this Sir Death, as naked and decrepit as our Latin hag with her scythe, this Sir Death with neither helmet nor sword.’ And I suddenly remembered ‘the loud tick-tock’ in that small sepulchral living room in the Lisbon cemetery of Os Prazeres, which, according to the traveler who ‘with a degree of indiscretion’ discovered and observed it,‘was to a normal tick-tock what a shout is to the spoken voice’; and I recalled the enigmatic words suggested by the sight of the alarm clock making the noise (‘of the kind we used to see in our parents’ kitchens, round in shape, with a bell like a spherical skullcap and with two small balls for feet’): ‘It seems to me that time is the only dimension in which the living and the dead can talk to each other and communicate, the only dimension they have in common.’ Perhaps when all the sand or all the water had trickled through, thus signaling the death of the old woman painted by Baldung Grien, and who was perhaps also the young woman, when he had finally sent them to join ‘the more influential and more animated majority,’ he would still have to turn over the hourglass or clepsydra in order to begin the countdown again, about which my compatriot the traveler wondered: Was it the amount of time they had been dead or the time yet to elapse before the final judgment? If it was measuring out the hours of solitude, was it counting those that had passed or those still to come?
I kept peering in at the larger Italian gallery, then turning back to spend a little more time with the German painting, which while it no longer frightened me, still intrigued me. From the threshold I saw, too, ‘The Annunciation’ by Fra Angélico, an excellent full-size copy of which had presided over my father’s living room for as long as I could remember, he and my mother had commissioned it from a friend who was a copyist, a Custardoy of the 1930s and ’40s, Daniel Canellada was his name I recall; seeing that painting was, for me, like being at home. On one of my brief forays into the German gallery, I lingered too long in front of the Baldung Grien and, when I returned to the Italian gallery, the man was no longer standing before the Parmigianino, I mean, before the Countess and her children. I bounded down the intervening steps, looking anxiously to right and left, but, fortunately, I spotted him at once, his now closed sketchbook under his arm, on his way to the stairs that led up to the first floor and then to the exit. That’s when I started to follow him, or where I became more like his shadow, not in quite the same way as I had been with Tupra on the journeys we made together, but in both cases I relegated myself to the background. Once upstairs, he went to the coat check, and I waited with my back turned until he reappeared, looking round every three seconds so as not to lose him again, and when he emerged, I discovered with horror that what he had left there and retrieved was a hat, possibly a fedora (‘A man wearing a ponytail and a hat,’ I thought, ‘possibly a fedora. Good lord!’). He had the good manners not to put it on while he was indoors, but only when he went out into the street, and then I saw—although it brought me little relief—that it was broader brimmed than the aforementioned fedora, more the kind of hat a painter or a conductor or an artist would wear, and black, of course. Duly behatted, he set off down the steps outside the museum, opposite the Hotel Ritz, and I followed after, always at a safe distance. He strode along the Paseo del Prado at a good pace, then stopped outside a brasserie, studied the menu, peered in through the window, shielding his eyes with his hand against the reflections on the glass (wasn’t the brim of his presumptuous hat enough?), as if he were considering having lunch there—although it was early for Madrid unless you happened to be a foreigner; perhaps I was wrong, and he was a foreigner; but he didn’t look like one to me, I could sense something une
quivocally Spanish about his whole appearance, especially the way he walked, or perhaps it was the trousers—and so I took advantage of that pause to look in the window of a nearby shop selling artifacts from Toledo, including swords—obviously aimed at tourists, but nowadays they wouldn’t be allowed to take such swords with them on a plane, they’d have to check them, and even then a sword wouldn’t easily fit in a suitcase; it wouldn’t be permitted on trains either, and I wondered who the devil would buy such swords now if they couldn’t be transported anywhere, a collector of decorative knives and swords like Dick Dearlove would presumably have them sent to him some way or other. Most would be made of our famous Toledo steel, very Spanish and very medieval, but I noticed that among those on display there were also a few that were apparently Scottish and even bore the name ‘McLeod’ engraved on the guard, an ignoble concession to the movie-mad Anglo-Saxon masses. It occurred to me that I might buy one, not right then, of course, but later, for I had learned from Tupra a little of the effect that such an archaic weapon could produce. Almost all of them, however, were much longer and larger, doubtless far more difficult and far heavier to wield than the ‘catgutter’ or Landsknecht or Katzbalger, they had really huge blades. They would cut off a hand at a blow. They would slice through and dismember. ‘No,’ I thought, ‘it would be best if it were a sword I didn’t have to get rid of, one that I could return to its place, used or not, it wouldn’t matter, one that I wouldn’t have to throw away or deliberately abandon for someone else to find later.’
The man who was now very probably Custardoy continued on along Carrera de San Jerónimo, past my hotel, where he peered in at the entrance and read the plaque there which states, incredibly, that the Palace Hotel was conceived, designed and built in the brief space of fifteen months spanning 1911 and 1912, by the Léon Monnoyer construction company, who were, I suppose, French or Belgian, I don’t know how the builders of today—that plague, that horde—can hold up their heads for shame or indeed shamelessness; a little further on, more or less opposite the Parliament building, he paused momentarily by the statue of Cervantes—who also had his sword unsheathed—there were some police vans parked there, with five or six policemen armed with machine guns standing outside to protect the honorable members, even though there were none to be seen, they must all have been inside or off on a trip somewhere or in one of the bars. The man with the ponytail and mustache had clearly retrieved something else from the museum coatcheck, a briefcase with no handles, into which he must have put his sketchbook, and he was carrying said briefcase under his arm and walking quickly, confidently, head up, eyes front, looking frankly about him and at the people he passed, and I had quite a fright when, as he was passing Lhardy, he slowed his pace and turned his head to observe the legs of a girl with whom he had almost collided, possibly deliberately I thought. I was afraid he might see me and recognize me, I mean from before, from the Prado. His response to the young woman was very Spanish, one I often have myself, although whenever I turned round like that in London, I had the sense that I was the only man who did, less so in Madrid, although there are fewer and fewer men who dare to look at whatever we want to, especially when the person we’re looking at can’t see us and has her back to us, which means that we’re not bothering or embarrassing anyone—in these increasingly repressive times the puritans are even trying to control what our eyes do, often quite involuntarily. His was a quick, appreciative, brazen glance, with those large dark marble-like eyes of his, intense and troubling, wide-set and lashless, which more or less coincided with what Cristina had told me about the way he visually grabbed at women; but perhaps that was an exaggeration, I myself sometimes look in a similar way at a passing derriere or a pair of legs as they move off, perhaps with less penetrating appraising eyes, more ironic or more amused. His eyes looked as if they were salivating.
If when he arrived at the ruined Puerta del Sol, he continued straight on, if he didn’t go down into the metro and didn’t catch a bus or a taxi, we would be on the right track, that is, heading for Custardoy’s house or workshop or studio, and then there’d be no further room for doubt that he was he. I feared for a moment that he was about to deviate from that route when, at the beginning of Calle Mayor, he crossed the street, but I was reassured at once to see that he was merely going into a rather fine-looking bookshop, Méndez by name. From the other side of the street, through the shopwindow, I saw him greet the owners or employees affectionately (patting them on the arm; and he was again polite enough to take off his hat, which was something), and he must have made some funny comment because they both laughed, a burst of generous spontaneous laughter. He left after a few minutes, carrying a bag from the bookshop, so he must have bought something, and I wondered what sort of thing he would read, then he crossed back onto my side of the road, and I retreated a few steps, until there was the same distance between us as there had been since we left the museum. However, I had to stop again almost at once and make a slow withdrawal from an ATM, in order to gain time and not overtake him, because he met a female acquaintance or friend—I caught a glimpse of blue eyes—a young woman in trousers, with short hair and a fringed suede jacket, à la Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett or General Custer when they skewered him. She smiled warmly at him and planted a kiss on each cheek, he must live in the area; they chatted animatedly for a few minutes, she obviously liked him (he didn’t take off his hat this time, but at least he touched the brim with his fingers when he saw the young woman, the classic gesture of respect in the street), and she laughed loudly at something he said (‘He’s the sort of man who makes people laugh, like me when I want to,’ I thought. ‘That could explain why Luisa likes him. Bad luck. Bad news’). No one would ever suspect that he hit women, or one particular woman, the woman who still mattered most to me.
He said goodbye and continued on his way; he walked with great resolve, almost fiercely sometimes when he increased the pace, he would never be bothered by any of the pickpockets or muggers who abound in that touristy area and who, for preference, fleece the Japanese; perhaps beggars would leave him alone too, his walk was that of someone who, however pleasant, is not open to overtures of that kind; and the duty of beggars and thieves is to recognize this at once and to sense who they’re dealing with. He proceeded on past the San Miguel market on his left, where the road went slightly downhill. On the wall of a building I noticed a carved inscription which said soberly, gravely: ‘Here lived and died Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca,’ the dramatist on whom Nietzsche, in his day, was so keen, as indeed was the whole of Germany; and a little further along, on the other side, a more modern plaque indicated: ‘In this place stood the Church of San Salvador, in whose tower Luis Vélez de Guevara set the action of his novel El diablo cojuelo—The Devil Upon Two Sticks—1641,’ a book it had never occurred to me to read, not even when I was at Oxford, but Wheeler, Cromer-Blake and Kavanagh would surely have known it. Custardoy went over for a moment to a statue immediately opposite, in Plaza de la Villa, how odd that a painter should be so attracted to the three-dimensional. ‘To Don Álvaro de Bazán’ was all it said underneath, the Admiral in command of the Spanish fleet at the Battle of Lepanto, where Cervantes was wounded in 1571, losing the use of his left hand when he was only twenty-four, which meant that he could justifiably refer to himself as ‘a complete man albeit missing a hand’ in the same lines of farewell that I had quoted to Wheeler, even though he didn’t want to hear them: farewell wit, farewell charm, farewell dear, delightful friends. There, too, was the Torre de los Luxanes, where it is said Francis I of France was held prisoner after being captured by the Spanish during the battle of Pavia in 1525; but since various other places in Spain also claim that he was held captive there, either a lot of people are lying or the Emperor Charles V trailed the French king round the country, exhibiting him like a monkey or a trophy.
Custardoy was still on the right track, the one that should lead him to his house, straight down Calle Mayor, and with me right behind, his rather distant
or detached shadow. ‘I’ve spent some time now being a shadow, ‘I thought,‘I have been and am a shadow at Tupra’s side, accompanying him on his journeys and talking to him almost every day, always by his side like a subaltern, an interpreter, a support, an apprentice, an ally, occasionally a henchman (“No doubt, an easy tool, deferential, glad to be of use”). Now I’m playing shadow to this man whom I’m not even sure is the man I’m looking for, but as regards him, I’m none of those other things; I’m a sinister, punitive, threatening shadow of which he as yet knows nothing, as is usually the case with those walking behind, who cannot be seen; it would be better for him if he did not continue along this route, or if his route turned out not to be the one I hope for and desire.’Just after thinking this, I thought he might escape me, because when he reached the Capitanía General or Consejo de Estado (where soldiers bearing machine guns stood outside the first door), he again crossed the street as if he were about to go into the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, which is immediately opposite. Except that he didn’t, he went down a narrow street just beyond that, and I felt really alarmed: surely, at this late stage, he wasn’t going to turn out not to be he and not approach that ornate door before which I had stood on two occasions now. At the end of that street, very short and for pedestrians only, I saw him disappear to the left and I quickened my pace slightly to not lose track of him, and to find out where he was going, and when I reached that same point, he very nearly did see me: there, in the corner, was an old bar, El Anciano Rey de los Vinos, where he took a seat outside, looking obliquely across towards the Palacio Real; in Madrid, what with global warming, it’s almost like summer for nearly six months of the year, and so there are tables and chairs set outside cafés and bars long after and long before the appropriate seasons. I immediately turned round to hide my face from him and pretended to read, like a tourist, another metal plaque just above me (and, of course, I did read it): ‘Near this place stood the houses of Ana de Mendoza y la Cerda, Princess of Éboli, and in one of them she was arrested by order of Philip II in 1579.’ She was the one-eyed woman, an intriguer and possibly a spy, who had doubtless in her day spread outbreaks of cholera, malaria and plague, as Wheeler had done, or so he said, and doubtless Tupra too, or perhaps the latter had merely lit the fuses that provoked great fires. (No age is free of such contagions; in every age there are people bearing flaming torches and people who talk.) The lady was always shown wearing an eye-patch, over her right eye I seemed to recall from seeing some portrait of her, and I thought, too, that I had watched a movie about her, starring Olivia de Havilland.
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