The Valley of the Fallen

by Carlos Rojas

  From the jesters, Francisco Bayeu led me to Las Meninas. At that time it was in a room only slightly higher than the painting, covered by long draperies. When they were pulled back, the light came in from a railed balcony where starlings wandered. Not even in Italy, in the Sistine Chapel, had I felt greater emotion before the work of a man. I wanted to shout, fall on my knees, bite at my hands until I ripped them to pieces. Velázquez, who had died more than one hundred years earlier, crushed me with his merciless superiority; but it made me proud to think that a creature born of woman, like me, had been able to conceive of such perfect beauty. Velázquez had suspended an ordinary moment in the heart of the court, the moment when a lady-in-waiting offers a cup to the princess. I told myself convincingly that any moment, even the most apparently insignificant, deserves the greatest of paintings to celebrate it. In May 3, 1808, in Madrid, I suspended all of time in the shout and gesture of the man they are going to execute. (“Father, what if God was deaf to our voices, like these executioners who kill us without being able to understand us?”) Not until I had finished the painting did I understand that I had painted the reverse of Las Meninas, and that May 3, 1808, was my response to Velázquez’s serenity at the time of the greatest of tragedies. Or perhaps I didn’t understand it, properly speaking, but rather the one who even now lives inside me as I’m dying.

  After losing my voice, I lost my sight. I no longer see Brugada, or Pío de Molina, or the doctors. I never had supposed that death was this peace, this improbable lucidity that seems to have come from a book rather than from the authentic agony of a flesh-and-blood Christian. (“It’s possible that this is so, because one wouldn’t call our destiny true but written in a madman’s novel where everything is repeated in different centuries.”) Moratín once quoted to me a phrase of Casanova’s from his memoirs: It isn’t bold to imagine a judicious pen describing a true fact when the writer thinks he is inventing it. Perhaps the other man, the one I think I am sometimes, believes he is describing an improbable death, which is at the same time my real agony now, in the small hours.

  Now, before daybreak, when I distinguish only light and shadow, the phantoms come out and scheme in the penumbra that envelops me. My paintings, starting to move, are only the fleeting passage of the history of my time. The flashy boys and girls of Blind Man’s Bluff dance, as they will prance around my tomb in San Antonio de la Florida. The fop with the long spoon and blindfolded eyes is transformed into my Wild Bull. Blindly and in vain he turns around and charges the dancers with long thrusts. They withdraw their bodies from his horn thrusts, ducking or sidestepping them with bends of the waist, laughing constantly. Nearby Martincho places banderillas a topa-carnero (his waist bending, his feet unmoving) in another black animal with wide horns that comes like a gale from the boards. In the ring Barbudo gores Pepe-Hillo in the pit of his stomach, while Juan López is late in luring the bull away and José Romero jumps the barrier to go to the aid of his rival. (“When I got him under control, I’ll t’row away the muleta and fight ’im wit’ my watch, so he sees it’s his hour that’s come, not mine.”) A very Madrilenian crowd, all classes pressed together and getting along, celebrates the fiesta of their patron saint in the San Isidro meadow. They play circle games and cards, converse, stroll, and flirt among unmoving barouches and berlins. On white cloths spread on the grass, the wine from Valdemorillo flows at lunch, among white parasols, silvered jackets, red boleros, flannel jackets, and plumed two-cornered hats. (“The greatest of portents does not consist in transforming the present but in anticipating its future changes. In this way our ashes will become our portraits, just as paint on a palette becomes a cloth in a mirror.”) In a room in the palace, Carlos IV and his family group together, smiling, and prepare to pose for my painting. In the center, the king takes a step forward and the rest step back. The Infanta María Luisa, princess of Bourbon Parma, holds her firstborn son, almost a newborn. Princess María Antonia turns her head and looks away at another painting, hanging on the wall behind them, where three giants, a man and two women, are taking their pleasure naked. I am the man. The queen raises her chest and smiles at me with her toothless mouth. (“We’ll have to find a bodice for this boy. He’s almost growing breasts like a girl.”) Dressed in mourning and with her face doubled, like Janus, María Teresa embraces me at the same time that she contemplates a stranger, who sneaks closer, creeping along the floor. María Teresa herself, still in mourning, flies through the air on three squatting monsters. (“If these people are as base as we are, what sense do our lives make, and theirs?”) In the Puerta del Sol the Mameluke cavalry charges the crowd. The entire square is a whirlpool of men, horses, spilled blood, torn flags, swords, knives, neighs, blasphemies, silent screams and shouts. (“That was a war we were all going to lose irremediably.”) Another mob, this one composed of the crippled, the drunk, the eyeless, the hungry, the leprous, the deformed, comes up a slope preceded by a blind man strumming a large guitar. Although I don’t hear their voices, I know they are hailing the Desired One and slavery. Gradually the crowds at that excursion, María Teresa, the flying monsters, the family of Carlos IV, the groups on the meadow, Barbudo, Pepe-Hillo, Martincho, all of them crowd and cluster around the circle in Blind Man’s Bluff to watch them dance. In the midst of the dancers, constantly charging with eyes identical to those of Saturn and now blindfolded, my Wild Bull pursues the air with useless thrusts of his horns.

  (“My paintings, put in motion, are nothing but the fleeting passage of the history of my time.”) When all my characters, including my own self-portraits, where I repeat myself and grow old, as well as preliminary sketches and drawings, have gathered around Blind Man’s Bluff, the darkness unexpectedly sweeps them away as the shadows abruptly change direction. Now in a glass fishbowl that probably measures no more than three spans on each side, a black painting, initially unknown, comes to life. Slowly I begin to make out a Madrid very different from the one I knew and treasured in my memory. In the night, because it’s late at night, perhaps fairly close to dawn, I recognize the palace and the Plaza de Oriente in the glass background. The plaza is the esplanade with gardens that the Intruder King flattened during the war, knocking down houses and clearing away alleys so that the cannon could shoot down any revolt like the one in May. The city, however, grew more than the trees. Extremely tall buildings that resemble the dream of a crazed master builder rise in a crowded noisy palisade against the sky. Large, many-armed streetlamps whiten the darkness between their bare branches.

  An interminable procession of three and even four people abreast crosses the plaza and seems to lengthen by entire leagues. Improvised metal railings keep to one side that endless serpent that slowly penetrates the Palacio de Oriente. Men and women are dressed in a manner never seen before, as if all of Madrid (this Madrid of gigantic apiaries) had put on identical unknown masks. Enveloped in strange overcoats they tremble with the cold, press against one another, rub their hands, numb with cold, slap their arms with their palms, and spew out frozen breath with their voices. Suddenly, and with no surprise on my part, I heard their words, as clear and distinct as if I had never been afflicted with deafness. “He was like a father to the country,” says an old man. “I’ve spent all night here, I haven’t slept; but I won’t leave without seeing him lying in state in the palace.” “They say some priests are blessing the body as they pass. Some people cross themselves. Others fall to their knees.” “We’re the Gypsies from Pozo del Tío Raimundo. For us too he was a good man.” “Do you think they’ll let me give him a kiss when I get there?” an old woman keeps repeating.

  The people around her are not unknown to me. In all of them I see the same crowds that hailed Godoy, the Desired One, the Intruder King, Riego, the Obstinate One. They are also the ones who dragged down Godoy in Aranjuez, knifing his legs; the ones who led Riego to the scaffold in a charcoal seller’s basket and then stoned the quarters of his body, cut up by axes and displayed on the spires of twenty cities in a future Chile; the ones who dis
emboweled the Obstinate One with goads and razors while he was handcuffed in a cage and danced with joy while the executioner burned his remains; the ones who invaded this same Palacio de Oriente with ropes to hang the Desired One, and on the road to Cádiz obliged him to kiss the windows of his carriage so they could spit in his eyes. I recognize them, as any painter would recognize them, the cut of their features and that light in their eyes, resembling the gaze of Velázquez’s dwarfs. I have seen them in the excursions and picnics on San Isidro, in church, at the bullfights, in roadside inns, in boarding houses, in taverns, at weddings, in fights, in brothels, in prisons. I heard them cheering the Inquisition, chains, freedom, the Constitution, the crown, the faith, the Revolution, death, prisons, the homeland, treason, vengeance, mercy, ignorance, absolutism, rebellion, the wild bulls, and the wine at Mass. They applauded not only the Prince of Peace, Fernando VII, Rafael Riego, and Juan Martín the Obstinate One, but also Costillares, Pepe-Hillo, Pedro Romero, José Romero, Joseph Bonaparte, Murat, the duke of Angoulême, the English, and the one hundred thousand Sons of Saint Louis. Now they will all go to the Palacio de Oriente to bid farewell to a dead man whom perhaps none of them has ever seen in the flesh. But at bottom they are not going to the palace, or anywhere, because as I always said to myself when I thought about them, they don’t know the way and they don’t know themselves.

  THE MONSTERS

  The Desired One

  The Desired One was born in the Escorial, October 14, 1784. A document in the National Historical Archive says he was very ill at the age of four, with an ailment that was a corruption of the blood. A surgeon at the Farm of San Ildefonso, Manuel Olivares, offered to cure him with a tisane of his own devising; other patients, cured by the drink, testified to its virtues. In the end, his recovery was finally attributed to the miraculous intervention of San Isidro Labrador.

  His first tutor was Fray Benito Scio, a learned Piarist who taught geography to his pupils by having them memorize the verses of the Araucana that describe the land. Fray Benito could recite the entire poem with his eyes closed. It is well known that one day, when the pedagogue was declaiming to the Desired One the verses that say “Like the hungry alligator when it hears / the school of fish noisily drawing near / as it cuts across the current,” he fell down dead from a sudden inflammation of his pia mater. The Desired One, who must have been seven or eight years old at the time, did nothing but ring a gong for someone to pick up the remains of his teacher. No one knew how to interpret that sign of sovereign indifference to another person’s death on the part of so young a prince.

  Then the prince’s preceptors entrusted the teaching of the Infante Don Carlos to Don Francisco Xavier Cabrera, bishop of Orihuela and a man very devoted to Godoy, whom he flattered shamelessly in the heading of all his letters: “My most loved and venerated Favorer and Prince . . .” Her Most Illustrious Majesty, who wrote with spelling mistakes, proposed a program of studies for the Desired One that would begin at six in the morning, from September 1 to April 30. After dressing, the prince would pray the Te Deum with his preceptor and the corresponding prayer, thanking heaven for having rescued him from the dark of night. The tutor would then propound to him some point of Christian meditation, government, or national politics.

  At seven the Desired One would withdraw to study the lesson in Latin that his teacher would take up at eight, while the prince had breakfast. The same preceptor would remain with him until nine, explaining the following lesson and engaging him in a review of previous ones so that they would not be forgotten. Then, until a quarter past ten, the illustrious pupil would have his hair dressed in order to hear Mass and recite the lessons referring to the history of Spain. When hairdressing, Mass, and history were concluded, His Royal Highness would have a dance class for an hour.

  At a quarter to eleven the Desired One would enter the rooms of his August Parents to render an account of his health, ask how they spent the night, and offer testimony to them of his filial love. Having returned to his own rooms, he would hear a lecture on Eloquence and Morality or preferably a sermon on Sacred History until it was time for lunch, which would always be served at twelve fifteen. After the meal he would take a siesta, without undressing, until two.

  The afternoon schedule would be as strict as the one in the morning. From two to three the Desired One would study the Latin lesson indicated previously. Then he would have an outing with his August Brother Prince Don Carlos and the respective deputies of the tutor. On their return from the excursion, which could be forbidden by the princes’ preceptors, he would go back to the royal chambers and repeat to Their Majesties his avowals of devotion. Having concluded this sacred duty, he would withdraw to review the lesson in grammar and receive thorough explanations of the next one. At eight he would pray the Rosary and the Litany, saving a few minutes afterward for an examination of conscience and to pray to God to forgive his defects. Finally the subchanters of the palace would read to him the saint of day from the Christian Year, instructing him in his virtues and advising him to imitate those moral qualities. At nine he would be served supper and could relax, spinning a top or playing cards, until he was sent for at ten or a little earlier. From the first of May until August 31, the prince would get up at five in the morning. During those months, morning exercises would take an hour and those in the afternoon would also take an hour.

  As for the precept of confession, whose office Their Royal Majesties the king and queen entrusted to the bishop of Orihuela, he advised the Desired One to practice it on all the festivals of Our Lord Jesus Christ and His Most Holy Mother, as well as on the days of the apostles, Saint John the Baptist, his patron saint San Fernando, and generally every Friday in the event one of the aforementioned celebrations did not occur in that week.

  At this time, when the Desired One was eleven years old, they named the royal chaplain and canon of the pilar, Juan Escoiquiz, as his teacher of geography, mathematics, and French. In his application, this ambitious ecclesiastic, a model of treachery, said he was the translator of Milton, Sabatier, and Cotte, as well as the author of an original unpublished poem in royal stanzas, Mexico Conquered. “In spite of being modesty itself, he should add that he was prepared to teach the proposed disciplines. He spoke and wrote French almost as well as Castilian and had knowledge of English and Italian.” If so honorable a position were granted him, the canon would request complete instructions so as to always proceed according to the desires of his benevolent protector the Prince of Peace and duke of Alcudia.

  Godoy, as poor a judge of his fellow man as he was of himself, erred when he selected Escoiquiz as an informer on his Royal Highness. The canon had hungers for power almost as fierce as those of the Prince of Peace and comparable scruples when the time came to satiate them. A good theatrical hypocrite because his manner was affable, he immediately gained the confidence of the Desired One. It did not take him long to understand that the prince’s hatred for Godoy and his mother exceeded only slightly his contempt for the king. More intelligent than all of them, and more vulnerable and rancorous, the Desired One despised them almost equally. Impatient like all Pharisees, Escoiquiz played his hand too quickly. He published his Mexico Conquered and dedicated it to the monarch. Then he proposed the heir’s attendance at the meetings of the Council of Castilla, so that he would become accustomed to the business of government. At the same time, it should be remembered, Godoy sensed the worst of his enemies in the Desired One, and suggested the possibility of sending him to America to subject with a firm hand the viceregencies to the crown. Exasperated, Carlos IV exiled Escoiquiz to Toledo. Nonetheless, from there he maintained communication with his pupil by means of a ridiculous code in which the king was Don Diego, the queen Doña Felipa, Godoy Don Nuño, and the Desired One himself was called Don Agustín.