The Valley of the Fallen

by Carlos Rojas

  On that same night, R. spoke to him for the first time about the book on Goya. A publishing house was prepared to offer him excellent terms for a definitive biography of the painter from Fuendetodos, along with an exhaustive study of all his works. His book would be published in an elaborate edition that Goya himself would have been proud of. He did not pay too much attention to how ambitious the project was or to the clauses in the contract. They seemed like accidental means to an indispensable end. The next morning, with R. as a witness, he signed the contract. He felt the same panic that overwhelmed him when he tried to stop drinking. An absolute terror before the impossible, which had become cruelly imaginable, the fear of knowing himself condemned to immortality in a perishable world that, once it had disappeared, would leave him, alone and eternal, in the midst of a universe hostile to life. The horror of being dead and destined to disguise himself as himself in another existence, to attend a masked ball in a gallery of mirrors. When those afflictions had been overcome, he got drunk again to free his spirit from the tedium that terrified him after his anguish. He wondered whether boredom would lead him to abandon the book, and he rejected those doubts immediately. The life of Goya began to be his own life.

  He spent that summer traveling through Spain to study works by Goya he had never seen. The portrait of the duke of San Carlos, in the collection of the marquis of Santa Cruz. The portrait of Moratín, in the Bilbao Museum, painted four years before Goya’s death in exile. The Appearance of the Virgen del Pilar to Saint James and his Disciples, in the Zaragozan art gallery of Pascual Quinto. The San Cayetano, the property of José Olabarría, part of the dispersed paintings of the palace of Sobradiel. The Three Dandies with a Bird, in Juan Cué’s house in Barcelona. The only full-length self-portrait of Goya standing, in the Madrid gallery of the count of Villagonzalo, and wearing a top hat whose band is in reality a candelabra to light up his canvases. (“The final touches, the ones that would bring his most personal effects to his paintings, were always done at night, and with artificial light,” Xavier Goya wrote when his father died.) Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, also standing, and with the sea as a background, in the Valls i Taberner collection. On the walls of the duke and duchess of Sueca, The Countess of Chinchón, pregnant by her husband, the Prince of Peace, when Goya painted her. Previously he had portrayed her at the age of two and a half in the palace of Cardinal Infante, her father. Both of them, Goya and the princess, would die in the same year of our Lord, 1828.

  In the autumn of 1973, Sandro was back in Colorado. He taught that semester at the university, but requested and was granted a leave of absence for the next two terms. With a fellowship from the Institute for Philosophical Studies, he traveled during the summer and fall of 1974 in search of other works by Goya. In the National Gallery, in Washington, he met up again with the countess of Chinchón as a little girl. “La S. D. María Teresa, hixa del S. R. Prince Don Luis, at the age of two years, nine months.” In the Meadows Museum in Dallas, he contemplated the portrait of a Man with a Fencing Sword. Folke Nordstrom identified the unknown subject as Francesco Sabatini, Carlos III’s architect. In the Fine Arts Gallery in San Diego, he spent a long time before The Duke de la Roca, and in the David-Weill collection in Paris, before The Marquise de la Merced. Time, Truth, and History, together with The Allegory of Poetry, brought him to the National Museum in Stockholm. The Countess of Haro kept him for long hours in the Burhles’s collection, in Zurich, as did Doña Isabel Cobos de Porcel in the National Gallery in London. Early in 1975 he was back in Spain. By then he would have been able to start writing the book, having studied thoroughly the most pertinent bibliography about Goya and his period. But he spent his free time rereading index cards, notes, and citations, without deciding to give them their own flesh and voice. One afternoon he reviewed with pleasure the conclusion of his notes on Godoy: “He spoke French and even Castilian badly, with Italianate turns of phrase and an Italian accent. In the Tuileries Garden he would take the sun and enjoy playing with the children. He would collect their hoops and toys, lend them his cane so they could ride it around the ponds, sit them on his knee. He also had a group of old retired performers there who took him for a Spanish actor. The deception pleased him and he never revealed his true identity to them. Two days before he died, he sent a letter, still unpublished, to his learned defenders in Madrid. At times I believe I have lived someone else’s dream, he told them. The dream of reason. He died in Paris on October 8, 1851.” At the bottom of the page, in a drunk’s trembling hand, he then had written: “The life will be divided into five parts: THE ABSURDITIES, THE DISASTERS OF WAR, TAUROMACHY, THE CAPRICES, and FURIOUS ABSURDITY.” On one of the nights when R. invited him to his house for supper, the other guests included Andrés Bosch, with Isabel and Rafael Borrás and, unexpectedly, Marina and her husband. He was amazed to see how little she had changed physically, as it would leave him flustered from then on in almost all their encounters. Only Marina’s silences seemed to have aged. Now they were much more prolonged and apparently emptier of reflections and hopes, perhaps populated only by mute words. Her husband, whose name he did not wish to remember, turned out to be younger than she was, a professor of philosophy at one of the Institutes of Secondary Education. He was short and paunchy, with rimless eyeglasses and the tiniest of feet; but he maneuvered like a spinning top. When he learned that Sandro had lived for years in the United States, he asked him whether he didn’t share his belief in a media conspiracy to overthrow Nixon, “whom I would say was guilty only of using too free a language in the presence of tape recorders. The definitive proof of his innocence is evident in his handing over the tapes, which he could have destroyed quietly at any time.” He supported freedom of the press because it was one of the rights of man, he continued orating without a pause and at length, while Sandro looked at him in astonishment, without deciding definitively whether to accept his reality; but he was roused at finding himself condemned to live in a world subjected to the most absolute and ominous of tyrannies: the power of its reporters. When Francoism fell (“which will end with the mortal life of the Caudillo”), a wave of pornographic publications devastated the country because here liberty was always confused with license. He was realistic enough to foresee the universal triumph of Communism, precisely because in the socialist countries there was a sense of history that would never permit another dictatorship even more absolute than theirs: that of supposedly objective information.

  A few days later Sandro phoned Marina. They began to see each other in dingy bars behind the Municipal Slaughterhouse or at the foot of Montjuïc. Soon she was following him to his house, with the same silent meekness that in another life had accompanied her to the bedroom surrounded by eucalyptus and almond trees beneath the Vallarca Bridge. They were lovers again surrounded by androgynous slaves, the angels of Piero, and Botticelli’s naked truth. There, with Garibaldi, Cavour, and Michelangelo as their only witnesses, Marina confessed that the abortion performed by the old woman with the capelet and the satin ribbon had left her unable to become pregnant. Then Sandro did not know what to think or say. That night, hours after Marina had left, he drank until he collapsed facedown on his desk. He awoke with a start, shaking, before dawn. He groped to turn on the light and wrote in a notebook in a trembling scrawl what he could not forget or read: “Saturn is my self-portrait and only tonight did I come to understand that.”

  That summer R. left Spain and lent him his house in the Pyrenees when Sandro asked him to, “so I can hide there to write the entire book once and for all.” He did not see Marina in July or August, though they phoned each other several times a week. In the autumn of our discontent, after the executions of El Xiqui, Otaegui, García Sanz, Baena Alonso, and Sánchez Bravo, and the next-to-last appearance of Franco looking out over the Plaza de Oriente to thank hundreds of thousands of Spaniards for their cheers, Sandro thought seriously about forgetting Spain and Goya forever, returning to the United States, this time with Marina, and never coming back. That was when,
on a two-day trip to Barcelona, he met Antonio de Senillosa almost by chance and vomited on the counter of that bar in the middle of the morning. (“You drink too much.” “It’s the only rational thing to do in this country.” “Perhaps you’re right.”)

  At home he bathed and changed his clothes. Then he phoned Marina, making a date to meet her there in the middle of the afternoon. “All this is sinister foolishness: our lives and this country of ours, because in the long run only we made it possible. If we can’t escape our history, at least let’s run off its stage. Leave your husband today and let’s go together to R.’s house in the Pyrenees. Then we’ll leave for the United States and there I’ll finish the book on Goya.” Marina agreed immediately and in silence, with a gesture. “Keep in mind that I, at least, won’t return. I’ve finished with this country, with its people, and with myself, because you represent the only part of my past I don’t want to renounce. If we go, we’ll never come back.” She concurred again, with an identical gesture.

  A month later, when he recalled all that as he descended along the riverbank, he thought he’d had another man’s nightmare: a dream as confused and murky as the pebbles glimpsed on the riverbed. He had not mentioned again their leaving for the United States, and Marina had not deigned to remind him of it. He continued to get drunk and talk constantly about Goya and his book, though he never decided to write it. Marina’s husband, the philosopher who would never confuse liberty with license, showed himself willing to negotiate a separation if Marina persisted in her determination to leave him. He told Sandro on the phone that he forgave them although he did not understand them. Sandro deduced from his attitude that events had created a break they had secretly desired for a long time. They said goodbye to each other very politely.

  The kingfisher pecked at the water again. The waves grew larger in the backwater, shattering the reflection of the branches and the slate-colored sky, and died out near the marsh and the dog roses, dispersing a school of dark fish. The river grew quiet again beneath the trees and the sky. “If I could remember that dream, at the end of all my insomnia, everything would make sense,” he thought as he looked at himself in the water. At a bend in the river he came across a grove of bare poplars that sheltered an old mill. A ray of sun sharpened the darkness like a lance on some millstones, half buried among the grass and shrubs. Suddenly he recalled a strange story that R. had told him without Sandro’s really believing it. The previous winter, in that mill, the Civil Guard had discovered a dead man wrapped in an old blanket made threadbare by rot. Upstream, on a bed of stones, they found the corpse of another, much younger man, disfigured by water and time, the bones of his face broken by blows, and a gold medal around his neck. Apparently the two bodies were never identified. When he asked R. who they could have been, he shrugged. “Every man,” he said, “is capable of every crime.”

  The mill had seen centuries beneath that sky. Around the window the decaying stone was becoming porous. The stout walls, made of craggy rock gilded by the centuries, seemed to have been built by blind giants, or by men who went mad thinking they were Cyclops. Three stone steps led to the oaken door, damaged by a lightning bolt that had fused part of the latch and the bolt, previously fastened with two turns of a key, twisting the metal and blackening the wood with its burn. Two shoves with his shoulder opened the door for Sandro. The mill was empty of creatures and furnishings. Dampness from the stream saturated its abandonment, and its one room reeked of cattle surprised by the storm. In the fireplace he saw an empty cauldron on abandoned tripods. On the bare walls the outlines of a cot and some high shelves were turning black. Between the chimney and the vent of cracked red tiles, Sandro stopped to crouch down, hesitant and shuddering. A large stain, like dried blood, was spattered on the floor and then extended, lighter in color, to the doorway. On his knees, he ran his fingers along the trail, feeling the absorbed anguish with which a devout man, sick and perhaps on the verge of death, would caress a relic. Immediately he remembered the forgotten dream at the end of his long periods of insomnia, the one that had preceded by several hours the call from R. offering him the assignment of the book about Goya.

  He had dreamed a slow, interminable nightmare that his memory brought back to him with implacable clarity. Lost in the depths of the Great Pyramid and ignorant of his own destiny, he searched tenaciously for the pharaoh’s burial chamber. He lit his way with a lantern that had four glass sides, stepping in the yellowish light and feeling with his palm the walls of endless corridors. At times he tripped over the bones of other men who had also lost their way in the labyrinth. They crackled under his feet like kindling and forced him to walk faster. Then he became aware that he was carrying out the search while he was asleep. With absolute certainty he told himself that all he had to do was wake up to free himself from his agony. “If I put the lantern on the ground and lie down beside its light, covering my head with my arms, I can dream in my dream that I’m sleeping and wake up. Everything will disappear immediately, the Great Pyramid, the spiderweb of its passages, the stepped-on skeletons, the darkness that surrounds me, the stone spattered with saltpeter that I touch with my fingers. Everything but me, Sandro Vasari, a descendant of Giorgio Vasari and of three generations of Italian xarnegos, because asleep or awake I’m always the same man, and perhaps shall be the same when I’m dead, if death is interminable insomnia or a nightmare of corridors the dead don’t wish to flee.” He repeatedly renounced the freedom of avoidance because his destiny was supposed to lead him not to the exit from the Great Pyramid but to the pharaoh’s catafalque. Abandoning that would be a betrayal of himself when he believed he was close to reaching his goal.

  Not only pilgrims and thieves had perished in the pyramid, searching for the burial chamber. Hunting parties and entire armies had lost their lives in the same pursuit. Their motionless shadows, forever etched and made enormous on the walls, fled in disarray toward the hidden center of the labyrinth. Following them, he turned an infinite number of corners, climbed walled slopes, slid and slipped down stone declivities. Slowly the passageway narrowed as the ceilings lowered. He found himself obliged first to crouch down and then to drag himself through a winding tunnel with hardly enough room for his body as he pushed the lantern with one hand. With a certain bitter satisfaction he told himself then that the final dice were rolled, although he did not know yet how they would fall. It was impossible to go backward in that passage and retrace his steps. Crawling and pushing himself forward with elbows and knees, he had to keep moving ahead to proceed with the dream pilgrimage and go deep inside the pyramid. Suddenly he came into a more spacious environment: his arms spread wide did not reach the walls, and his head did not brush the ceiling when he stood. As he picked up the lantern from the ground, he wondered, trembling, whether he had reached the pharaoh’s burial chamber. His own shout deafened him then as it was enlarged and repeated by echoes. He found himself in a square chamber that must have measured some ten feet by ten feet: a false crypt, perhaps constructed in the very heart of the pyramid to confuse intruders. In the back, built into the wall, he saw the livid, reverberating mirror from the house where he’d had his meetings with Marina, reflecting his exhausted image.

  As soon as he tried to touch the glass with his fingers, the mirror disappeared. On the other side of the mirror he stopped at a crossing of several paths. Some would lead to the Pharaoh’s tomb or to another false catafalque. Others would take him to the desert. At random he chose a gallery that soon began to break into multiple right angles. He had lost all hope of coming to the end of those confusions, when he thought he could see a faint reflection that illuminated the walls in the most distant angles. Having reached the end of the corridor, he was blinded for a moment by the light of some streetlamps. This time he bit his lips to silence his shout, fearful that his own howl would wake him. He had returned to the courtyard of the house on Calle Moncada, near the Arco de San Vicente, at what seemed to be soon after nightfall. He saw again the stone rim around the old well and wa
lked on the large flagstones with small, hesitant steps. The large door to the storehouses was still open; perhaps carriage houses and stables had been there before. Against a background of casks, wineskins, basins, barrels, spigots, demijohns, and spiderwebs, workers walked back and forth in their long leather aprons. He did not dare speak to them or approach them, suspecting they would then disappear like the mirror in the false crypt.

  He hesitated, wondering whether the burial chamber, hunted by so many dead men over the centuries, really existed. Did the pharaoh perhaps build the pyramid precisely in order not to be buried in its interior? Could that be the greatest and most inconceivable of ironies, the eternal search for a corpse that in reality did not exist? Why not wake up then and return to life, insisting with all its might on reclaiming him? Other opposing forces, the same ones that had grimly buried him in that nightmare, overcame his doubts and obliged him to continue the search. At the top of the stairs with the stone balustrade and beneath the tiled overhang, the half-open pine door waited for him. The house seemed abandoned now, the furniture draped in ghostly white covers. At the foot of the latticed mullioned window he made out the sofa where Marina had waited for him in the irrevocable past. “Everything, even this dream of mine, is another man’s rough draft,” he said to himself as he crossed deserted rooms. By the light of the lantern that he still held, almost forgotten, in his hand, he read an inscription in golden letters over a closed door: “Not a single man on earth is capable of knowing who he is.” With cold indifference, which did not even manage to surprise him, he understood that he had reached the end of his odyssey. That was the hidden center of the pyramid. With ironic, exhausted slowness, he lifted the latch and pushed the lock.