by Carlos Rojas
In the Hall of Columns, Franco lay in his coffin in uniform. His endless dying, with its hemorrhages and surgeries, left no serious trace on the old man’s face that the embalmers obviously remodeled with a master hand. Only on his upper lip, very close to the corner of his slimmed-down mouth, a wound similar to the mark of a pinprick was clearly visible on the screen. But nothing was left of the man who was Head of State, President of the Government, National Head of the Movement, and Generalissimo of the Armies, responsible only to God and to History. Nothing was left, Sandro repeated to himself, of the man who in his farewell address to the mounted cadets of the Military Academy of Zaragoza had said that there he had done away with officers who were puny weaklings; the man who prophesized in 1942 or 1943 that the world war would mean the end of one era and the beginning of another in which the liberal world would perish, victim of the cancer of its own errors, together with its imperialism, its capitalism, and its millions of unemployed; the man who at about the same time, or perhaps a little earlier, wrote to Hitler, Adolph, son of Hitler, Alois, an official of the imperial and royal customs house, and Hitler, Klara, née Pölzl, daughter of Pölzl, Johann, a peasant from Spital in Lower Austria, that he felt joined to him in a common historical destiny, whose abandonment would mean his suicide and that of the Cause he had represented and led in Spain; the man who ten or twelve years after the Second World War and the suicide of Hitler, Adolph, son of Hitler, Alois, an official of the imperial and royal customs house, would tell the representative of a French newspaper (Le Figaro?) that at absolutely no time during the conflict did he plan to place his country on the side of the Rome-Berlin Axis, and in a sense, Tokyo as well; the man who, at the end of that same worldwide conflict, would give the most negative of all the definitions of Constitutional Law after the final words of Carlos II, the Bewitched: “We are not on the right, or on the left, or in the center” (the Bewitched, on his death bed, “I am no longer anything”); the man who at about the time of the interview granted to the French paper (Le Figaro? Le Matin? France-Soir? No, it definitely wasn’t France-Soir) would say it was completely absurd and malevolent to call him a dictator, since his prerogatives and powers were very inferior to those of the president of the United States, at that time Eisenhower, the former general; the man who, in the middle of the civil war, assured the correspondent from another foreign paper, this time Japanese, that once his mission was concluded, he would retire to the country and lose himself in private, domestic life; the man who twenty years later, specifically and precisely on November 22, 1966, on the occasion of the introduction in Parliament of the Organic Law of the State, would speak of the familiar demons of the Spanish nation: an anarchic spirit, negative criticism, lack of solidarity, extremism, and enmity; the man who, four years before his death, four years almost to the day, affirmed that as long as God granted him strength, life, and clear judgment, he would remain at the helm of state in the service of the unity, greatness, and liberty of his people.
Sandro did not allow himself to be carried away by easy emotions. The ones that, in the name of obvious truths, tolled for the dead man from the depths of the past. Those that oppressively reiterated the perishable nature of power: as transitory, or even more so, than men themselves. The winds of time carried away the ashes of empires and of slaves. Because it is mortal, in the end there is nothing more human than history. El Greco survived Felipe II, who did not like his art; as Velázquez survived Felipe IV, who sincerely admired him; as Goya survived Fernando VII, who feared and respected him in so evident and enigmatic a manner. All of that became insignificant through repetition. (“I would have displayed your body lying in state at the Puerta de Alcalá, watched over by the royal halberdiers and a troop of cavalry,” repeated one of those voices deep inside him that had become inseparable from his deepest being. “I would have displayed your body lying in state . . .”) The television screen looked like a dark aquarium where images trembling in the depths of night slipped away. Far away, in a genuine, inalienable distance, Sandro again heard the strident wail of a wet index finger caressing the rim of a glass.
In the Grande Chartreuse of Bordeaux the inscription on the tomb that Goya shared with his son’s father-in-law was mistaken. Hispanienses Pertisimus Pictor, who they said passed at eighty-five and not eighty-two, his age when he died. If they noticed the error, Xavier and Mariano Goya never cared to correct it. It was likely that they had forgotten the precise age of their father and grandfather. Alfonso XII was the first to propose the transfer of Goya’s body to Madrid, soon after the restoration of the monarchy. However, as usual, Spanish administrative functions bogged down and took too long. The king died before the remains were exhumed. In 1888, during the regency of María Cristina, the recovery of the bones was brought up again. As Saint-Paulien so aptly put it, Sagasta had recognized civil marriage and promulgated universal, though restricted suffrage, and there was no reason for the liberal remains of the painter of San Antonio de la Florida to remain in exile. On February 25, 1889, the city council of Bordeaux authorized the prefecture of la Gironde to perform the exhumation. The boards of the coffins had rotted and the remains of Goya and Goicoechea mixed together. Amazingly, even though the grave offered no signs of having been violated, the authorities found only one skull: the one belonging to Goicoechea. Les verifications ont permis de constater que le corps que l’on croit être celui de Goya n’aurait pas de tête . . . Those in charge of the exhumation vacillated over the mystery. They requested instructions from Madrid, but Madrid, disconcerted, decided to forget about so irritating a case. After a year the bones of the two men returned to their grave. Goya, dead, patiently continued to waste away in exile.
The enigma of the missing skull would not begin to be clarified until eighty years later. Apparently, in 1846, it was removed by a French phrenologist, the painter Dionisio Fierros, and the marquis de San Adrián. Three years later, Fierros painted in oils and dated a canvas, on the back of which the marquis de San Adrián wrote in his own hand: The Cranium of Goya Painted by Fierros. Fierros felt a “strange tenderness for that skull,” according to his widow, and kept it under a bell jar in his study. Later, the painting was lost in Zaragoza. In 1911, one of the artist’s sons, a medical student in Zaragoza, took the skull apart and divided the pieces among his friends after letting them in on the secret. He kept a piece of the parietal bone as a kind of relic, which his grandson still had in 1961, when he revealed the entire story to Mundo Hispánico.
That was the fate of Goya’s remains, on the interminable barren plains of death, where Franco now accompanied the painter of the shootings of May 3 in Madrid. The remains in San Antonio de la Florida and the splinter of the parietal, the private and, until then, secret property of Dionisio Gamallo Fierros, was also all that remained of the painter of four kings, the deaf lover of María Teresa in Sanlúcar, the close friend of Costillares, Pedro Romero, and Pepe-Hillo, the most truthful and implacable witness to his time, and the man who had descended down to the deepest interior chasms and found there abysses and spaces as immense as those that separated nebulas and constellations, among which a terrified humanity trembled. But the pilgrimage of Goya’s remains was not over yet. In 1899, on the brink of another century that in Spain would see all the horrors of The Disasters of War exaggerated, and the stupidity and irrationality of The Caprices and The Absurdities magnified, Goya’s remains, confused with Goicoechea’s, returned to Madrid. There the cemetery of San Isidro gave them shelter, expecting a monument that was supposed to honor them along with the remains of other exiles like Moratín, Donoso Cortés, and Menéndez Valdés. The monument was never built. Finally, on November 29, 1919, they found rest beneath the frescoes of San Antonio de la Florida. Goya’s final burial did not move the Madrid of the period to any great extent. The country that prayed and charged, as Machado had written a little earlier, destroyed and forgot with identical celerity. La Esfera, for example, did not even mention the ceremony at San Antonio. The decapitated skeleton of G
oya now slept in a metal coffer beneath a stone slab. (“At nightfall everyone leaves and the winter stars begin to light up above the lantern. Only the moon and the presbytery lamp illuminate that chapel, where a play of mirrors in the corners multiply my paintings and the shadows. Suddenly, without raising latches or pushing doors on their hinges, the four couples of Blind Man’s Bluff pass the walls, and holding hands, form a circle around my tomb.”) Ramón Gómez de la Serna, who was present at Goya’s last burial so far, observed in astonishment the small size of the case. It is distressing and shocking, he thought to himself, to see how the greatest men diminish.
All at once and always with movements that seemed measured and thought out, Marina turned off the television. Then she sat down on the rug, next to Sandro, and lit a cigarette.
“All this,” she said in a hushed voice, “has already happened.”
“It’s very possible,” Sandro agreed, “though no demographic or historical document exists that indicates the death of any other Galician.”
“You didn’t understand me, or you don’t want to. In any case, it doesn’t matter.”
“I’m making an effort to understand you.”
“If that’s so, you forgot who we are or, more to the point, who we aren’t. We and everything around us, including the vigil for Franco in the Palacio de Oriente, exist only in R.’s book. Nothing is ours, Sandro, not the history and not the chimeras. Everything we saw on television is as unreal as the phantoms of Blind Man’s Bluff dancing in the meadow, because we ourselves are another man’s dream or fairy tale.”
“Then why did you say that all this had already happened?”
“Because this is true. In real time, the time in which R. is truly alive and is writing our lives, it’s been a year or two since Franco died.”
“R. was the one who called us from the United States to tell us he had just died.”
“He called us in his book. How many times do I have to repeat it before you begin to listen to me? By then, in reality, months or years had passed since the death of that man, who so many believed was immortal.”
Two dawns before, at about five in the morning, Sandro dreamed that he was dreaming. In the dream he could make out a man, prematurely aged and poorly dressed, playing with some children in a public garden, which then disappeared in a thunderstorm. Then he dreamed that he awoke and saw a woman, not Marina, naked and sleeping facedown beside him. In his memory now he saw again her very dark hair, a brilliant black, spread over her shoulders and the sheets. On the other side of a window a storm was clearing. A rainbow appeared in the sky, and, passing through the glass, flashed on the woman’s back, setting it aflame with all the colors of the prism. Sandro woke her then and said: “I dreamed I saw Godoy in a park where I had never been. He was very old, but I recognized his features, because I’ve never forgotten a face. Sitting on a bench and dressed like someone unemployed, he was talking to other grandfathers as poorly dressed as he. At times the children approached him and he gave them his cane so they could ride it around a pond. My dream melted away in a storm. I don’t understand it, but I’m afraid it’s a bad omen.” At that moment the ringing of the telephone really woke him. The window, the morning, and the rainbow disappeared. It was Marina sleeping now beside him, on her stomach, and naked. He picked up the phone in a daze and heard the voice of R., as close and distinct as if he were speaking to him in the same room. “Sandro, do you want to witness the fall of the last Empire raised to God, like the Tower of Babel?” His spirit brightened when he heard the news. He was completely lucid when he asked if they had published the news in the United States. “American television just announced it. It’s eleven at night here, Eastern Time,” R. specified. “I’ll leave you now in the company of a more or less uncertain history.” It wasn’t until the next morning that Sandro realized that R. hadn’t told him exactly where he was phoning from (Eastern Time) or asked about his book on Goya. He also never found out whether when he referred to a more or less uncertain history, he was talking about the past or the future.
“If two years really have passed since the death of Franco, and we are nothing but fictional beings lost in a book where R. struggles in vain to give us life, what’s really going on in the country now? Do you happen to know?”
“How would I know if R. didn’t want us to see the future in his work? As for the rest, I also don’t know what that question’s about. You always said that living here is seeing the same thing over again, and that the future of Spain is doubtful because its present tends to resemble its past.”
“I said only the last part,” Sandro gently defended himself. “The rest is from Azorín, though that seems a lie.”
“It doesn’t matter who it’s from.” He was astonished at the impatience in Marina’s voice. “If we never were really alive, if we draw breath only in the mind of a flesh-and-blood man, then this country never really existed either.”
He admitted to himself again that Marina had lost her mind. Yet her dementia revealed an intrinsic consistency whose internal logic (“the logic of dreams or of literary characters, these fictional beings that she claims we are”) seemed both brilliant and compelling. As he had done six days earlier, faced with the phantoms dancing in the Prado disguised as flashy young dandies, he affirmed his belief that madness was the most convincing of certainties while the remaining realities, of knowledge, sentiment, and the senses, were always relative and negotiable. In that case, why not accept Marina’s nonsense and willingly make it his own? After all, the important thing wasn’t existing or not existing but learning to know oneself, Sandro said to himself, never knowing whether that idea was his or R.’s and he had plagiarized it without realizing it.
“Goya did exist,” he affirmed in a quiet voice, avoiding Marina’s eyes.
“He existed and said that the dream of reason produces monsters. Creatures like us conjured up by R.’s reason, unless he’s crazy and we’re creatures not of his reason but his delirium.”
“In any case, if he were mad and we were his phantoms, we’d never know about his insanity either.”
“Oh, he’s crazy! Don’t doubt that for a second!” Marina repeated, excited now, tossing her lit cigarette onto the smoking logs in the fireplace. “Who but a madman could have imagined people like us to give us the absurd destiny it was our luck to fall into? Think of your dead children and mine who will never be born. Think of the ghosts in the painting. Think of the painted bull when it appeared alive at the foot of the window. Think of our unlikely meeting and the fact that now we find ourselves together here, in R.’s house, not really knowing whether we love or hate each other . . .”
“I suppose you’re thinking too about my book on Goya,” Sandro said, controlling his expression and lowering his eyes.
“I wasn’t going to forget it, because in a sense it’s the most senseless of R.’s deliriums. Your book exists only in his, the one he’s writing about us. You’ll never finish it, because R. planned that you wouldn’t. Just for that reason he made you responsible for it. It will be left endless in R.’s work, which among other things will be the story of this frustration of yours.”
“Perhaps you’re right about that . . .” Sandro murmured, his gaze fixed on the flickering fire.
“Of course I’m right! You must think I’m talking nonsense and even feel tempted sometimes to infect you with my madness. Don’t try to deny it, because I see it in your eyes.” In silence, Sandro continued to contemplate the flames. “At first I supposed that my ravings were R’s punishment, the torture imposed gratuitously by a sadistic author on one of his creatures. Now I know, however, that my madness is only the reflection of his: the living image of the insanity of someone who at the same time imagines himself as reason and as our reason for being.”
His hands crossed beneath his chin, his elbows pressing against his knees, a motionless Sandro studied the fire in the depths of the fireplace. Very far away, in the final abysses of himself, he heard again the interminable moan
of the glass rubbed back and forth by a damp finger. He wanted to tell Marina that this wasn’t the complete summary of the drama and the condition of the two of them. Even in the case that he and Marina were both only chimeras in the book R. was writing in his own image and likeness, another man and other voices were insistently making themselves heard deep inside Sandro, obliging him to identify with a dead painter in exile a century and a half before Franco lay in state in the Royal Palace. The invisible glass was squeaking now like a rusty blade against a whetstone. (“Señor, I beg you!” “Ah, forgive me! I thought you heard absolutely nothing.” “I do hear this screeching. And sometimes thunderclaps too, when they sound very far away.”) Yet he said nothing about all that. Without looking away from the logs and the tripod, he murmured as if to himself:
“Godoy too, in a letter written two nights before he died, said he sometimes believed he had lived someone else’s dream: actually, the dream of reason. Perhaps it isn’t necessary to add that the letter is unpublished and belongs now to R. He gave me a photocopy.”
“Very good! If the dream of reason produces monsters, let’s see now if the dream of monsters like us conjures up our reason for being!” Kneeling next to Sandro, Marina pressed his palms between her cold, trembling hands. “R.’s book is almost finished and at any moment, whenever he decides, we’ll disappear into the void. I want to live and I want to live with you! Just like the damned country, as you call it, wants to live in peace and harmony after the great absurdity ending now with the death of Franco.”
“Marina, for the love of God, try to calm down . . .”