The Oldest Confession
“Yes,” Jean Marie hummed. “I can feel what we see and what you say.”
Bourne made his voice a shade more monotonous and a beat slower. “Feel what I am saying to you. Absorb it into your innermost mind. When we finish the next drill, the second counting drill, number forty, you will go to your room and you will lie down and rest. While you rest you will think about what I have been saying and you will see the truth in it. You will see the strength you have been given to do this thing. By counting to twenty-seven, by reducing the entire action to twenty-seven simple movements you will have found complete external order. The external in order, the internal life cannot be confused or troubled. Your imagination cannot carry you away and weaken you with insomnia and nausea. Twenty-seven simple moves outside your mind and body. Twenty-seven. Only twenty-seven. Feel it as we do it again. We will go through the real drill this time. We will actually take the frame down, move it into the mother frame, and hang your copy on the wall. Then it will all be over. Make yourself ready. Think only of the count. You are exhausted but you will be refreshed if you think only of the count. Only twenty-seven numbers. We start now. When I nod to you we start.” He nodded.
Jean Marie got up from the canvas chair and began his cross to the corner of the painting. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.” He was in position.
Bourne inserted the bolt cutter behind the frame and began his own first pattern. “One, two.” The metallic clicks were sharp and clear as the cutter went through. Bourne removed the collapsible ladder from under his coat. “One, two,” he said, his face serene, his manner relaxed and unhurried.
Jean Marie stared at him, impatient to begin his count again.
Just as Saturday is the best day for the West End of London, because London is a walking city and Saturday finds it deserted, and Friday is the best day nearly anywhere in the United States cities because it is payday, Sunday is a great day in Madrid. The people all go to church so dress their best to uphold themselves among the others. After church, to put these clothes to total use and to employ the tonic spring most fully, they stroll or march or walk, depending upon individual personalities. A favorite course is the Paseo de la Castellana which is bounded on the north by Conrad Hilton and on the south by Cesar Ritz. It has two beautiful plazas of its own, and shares two others with relatives. It has tall trees, thickly leafy. It has the most luxurious, restful sidewalk cafés in the world, contained in peace as though conscious of the need to restate man’s humanity to man.
On the Sunday before the Tuesday which stood like a mountain in her mind, Eve sat beside Bourne in a straw easy chair before a breakfast table on the ramblas of the Paseo de la Castellana, drinking coffee early in the morning rich with sunshine. The gran paseo of well-dressed Madrid, rich or poor, had begun, and the word Sunday in Spanish has the onomatopoeic ring of the gayest bells: Domingo!
Eve had climbed out of the squalor of her fear. She had told herself that she was resigned to what would happen and she believed she had pushed her fear far enough back into her mind to misplace it if she needed to start to look for it again. She sipped her hot coffee and enjoyed the marchers until all at once it came to her that she was seated at the intersection of Calle de Zurbarán, and the millrace of acid fear began again.
The erosion had gone far enough that she did not think in terms of Muñoz any more, only of Bourne and herself. Two nights before he had struck her with his broad hand, knocking her across and over the broad bed and leaving the marks of his fingers under the make-up on the side of her head because she could not stop pleading with him to get out with her; she had had to start all of it all over again. He knew whenever she started, that if he walked away, then ran, she would walk then run after him, saying what she must say. Before he had hit her Friday night he had told her, “I don’t have a woman to bring me trouble,” because man has never perceived that is the only reason why God gave him woman, to make him trouble and to stir him to glory from among the sun-warmed beer cans of his ego.
On the Sunday morning, on the ramblas, she started blandly enough. She said, “What is the flaw which makes criminals, do you think?”
“Resentment in the mild cases. Then maybe fear, called by them contempt, in the major cases.”
“Contempt of what?”
“Birth, I guess.”
“Station at birth?”
“No, no. Just having been born without having been consulted. That simple gaffe on somebody’s part has caused some of the world’s great rages.”
“I agree it could frighten everyone who thinks about it long enough, if they were silly enough to spend their logic retroactively, but certainly not every criminal thinks of it.”
“Thinking doesn’t come into it. They feel it. They are afraid of being left behind in some awful, unknown night. They are afraid of the scorn of working with all the others who are willing to work because they think honest work can make one faceless and being faceless, not findable, not identifiable, and therefore more easily left behind. It’s hard times. It isn’t helped much to call it contempt when you feel a fear like that.”
“Do you feel it?”
“I have felt it.”
“Do you feel it now?”
Bourne seemed to study the lace mantillas of two beautiful silver-haired ladies who walked away from them. Eve followed his gaze and was fixed by their carriage. For no reason she thought of the Spanish School of Riding at Vienna, and realized that she had become a student of the Spanish School of Walking in Madrid.
Bourne began to rumble on against her question. “You know, I’ve read over and over again about the relief supposedly felt by many criminals when they are finally caught and sentenced and imprisoned. And I have read the nonsense that they had unconsciously wanted to be punished and had necessarily arranged the pattern so that they would be punished. That’s a lot of stuff.”
“Is it? I don’t think it is.”
“Well, you’ve never studied it and you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about anyway. I think that criminals need to be caught and sentenced and imprisoned, not to be punished but to be loved. It is an ideal arrangement for those with blind psyches. They can keep their contempt and their fear as coffins to sleep in yet still be able to accept the loving attention of the rest of society within the definition of honorable bounds. The pursuit by society of the criminal takes a keen interest of the most personal and overt sort. The majesty of the impersonal grief felt by society when they must shut away another creature or, sometimes, kill him for his own good is grief nonetheless and grief may only emerge from deep loss. The solicitousness of society as they house, feed, clothe and re-educate their frightened brothers is a mark of love. It’s all an enormous process of love made insane and bringing pain instead of hope with its fulfillment.”
“Do you include yourself in this—this frightened fraternity?”
“No.”
“Why not? You steal for a living. Stealing is the most literal kind of taking, if we are going to theorize, yet every teacher worth remembering has taught that the only real need is someone else’s need, that only if you give can you get.”
“A man must tell a story with his life and the story must have order, that’s what reason is. That’s how I want to live it. My reason, to show you that I know exactly what the hell you are talking at all over again and to prove to you that I no longer resent it, my reason in this Spanish chapter of the story I’m telling with my life is that I have put nearly eight per cent of that life into getting those paintings. That’s an imperative reason. If I negate it, I negate myself.”
“Balls,” she answered.
“What?”
“I was merely commenting that you were making noises like a stuffed male.”
“Ah, sometimes I’d like to whack that smug superior look of yours right across the street, you semantically inhibited, Scotch Calvinistic bitch.”
“You call that cursing?”
“Well, what are you talking about with tha
t stuffed male jargon?”
“Because reasons mean nothing,” she answered. “Don’t go leaning on reasons. Reason is nothing. Meaning is what a life has to have.”
“Now, what the hell, Eve! Why do you always have to argue like this? Meaning and reason are the same thing.”
She looked at him as though she would have hit him with the coffee pot joyously. “Jim, my dearest Jim,” she said. “That rotten, little son-of-a-bitch Muñoz told us his reason for killing Señor Elek, but the reason had no meaning. His life has no meaning, only reasons. His reason for living is to justify his ancestors, some people he has never seen and cannot prove existed, therefore they can have no meaning. Because he exists only on reasons he cannot feel love; only pride, and pride has no meaning because it is merely vanity felt from doing one’s best and when it is vanity felt from the best or worst done by some people one cannot prove existed, then it is utterly without meaning. But we love. You love me, I know you love me. And I love you or I would have left you for what you are but I cling to you and hope for you for what you are. Only that has meaning. Not paintings or profits. You can’t pull paintings into your internal life, that peace or war you always talk about, that battleground within yourself; but you can take me there and I belong there, Jim. I have a right to be there and I beg you, Jim, to slug Muñoz and let’s get the hell out of all this pain.”
He sat staring at his hands which rested in his lap as though the final answer lay in them. It was a long time before he spoke but he did speak, softly and carefully. “Eve, you feel fear for us, and I say it is unreasonable. In my whole career I have never seen a job which will play out as smoothly and as safely as this one. I cannot throw three or four or five hundred thousand dollars away because you have developed a case of jitters. If you could prove that there was the possibility of harm to someone anywhere in any part of this thing, I would listen to you and I would take you away from here. But it is harmless and it will be sensationally profitable and for Christ’s sake stop looking at me as though all of these dull, business reasons had something to do with my not loving you because you know goddam well where we stand on that question but I will state it again so that it becomes clearer than clear. I have never loved anyone else, I am incapable of loving anyone else and I will never love anyone else through all of my lifetime.”
She leaned across and kissed him on the cheek and made her peace.
Each pair had so looked forward to seeing the other again that, although they drove in from different directions, their cars each slid into the parking slots in the Plaza de la República Argentina in front of the Commodore restaurant at exactly the appointed hour, two forty-five, which put them into an even more euphoric mood, if that were possible. The manic state, while totally unexpected for the Bournes, was habitual with the duchess and Cayetano.
The ladies ascended in the tiny elevator, operated by a small boy with bright red hair, freckles and a scarlet suit with shining brass buttons.
The men climbed the short flights of stairs. They all sat at a large round table overlooking the courtyard, beside a wide-open window, and ordered martinis con vodka as though it were part of a special ritual in a special shrine. The air shimmered with manic angels. The duchess spoke Catalan with Señor Torte, the keeper of the keys, and three long-aproned waiters stood by warily lest ice cubes show signs of melting.
Cayetano observed that it seemed a sad thing that, in a world so filled with facile lyricists, no one had ever written a song to the first martini con vodka at any luncheon. Eve told him she had once sung a dirge following the fifth martini con vodka.
“No dirges,” the duchess admonished, “as I am thinking in terms of two hundred violins and estragon sauce and because I have an announcement to make.” She lifted her own martini con vodka and told them that she and Cayetano would be married in Madrid on the concluding Saturday of the Feria of San Isidro, however banal that might sound. There was a storm of handshaking, kissing, backslapping, martini gulping, and an orthodox number of tears were contributed by Mrs. Bourne into a small handkerchief she always had with her in the event of such announcemnts.
Bourne rushed one waiter off for another round of martinis and another waiter for two magnums of iced champagne. They left at top speed but Señor Torte, the keeper of the keys, came right back to Bourne to check whether Bourne had really meant two magnums. Bourne discovered that he had not meant magnums, he had meant bottles, but he appreciated the idea of two magnums so much that he persuaded Señor Torte to allow the order to stand.
Eve wanted to know where they would be married in Madrid, as if that mattered. She asked the question with that sense of desperate urgency women can get about such things and the duchess took the cap off the tension by stating that they would be married in her late husband’s home on Alcalá and Lagasca because it would please the servants so. She told them that, except for themselves, she had decided to invite no one below the rank of bishop. Cayetano said he had decided to invite no one below the rank of picadores above the age of fifty because in that way, although none of the picadores would be likely to get any more religion, it would be a marvelous social opportunity for the bishops.
The actual ceremony would be at some church, the duchess supposed, so as not to shock the servants who, excepting the Bournes and Cayetano, would be the only real friends she would have left when this news came out, but most certainly the reception would be at her late husband’s house and she would ransack every one of her houses for every known portrait of her late husband to be nailed to the walls of the reception room to increase everyone’s sense of fun.
“I feel so good,” the duchess said, “that I wish I could hire an entire regiment of Scottish bagpipers just to walk through this restaurant once, playing something awful. You look very thin to me, Jaime.”
“That may be,” Bourne answered, “but whatever you’ve been doing, you’ve never looked so wonderful.” Then he seemed to hear what he said and started to blush.
“Stop that kind of talk, Jaime,” the duchess said, “it embarrasses Cayetano.”
“I haven’t got the strength left to be embarrassed and I’m only a boy,” Cayetano told him.
“Just for that you get no more marzipan,” said the duchess just before finishing the martini before her. “Now that we’re back here I can’t tell you what a marvelous feeling it is to get away from Madrid if only because one doesn’t run into Picketts.”
“One doesn’t say one runs into a picket,” Eve corrected, leaning forward so that the waiter could set martinis down. “One says one runs into a fence.”
“Eve just made a joke in English, darling,” the duchess told Cayetano.
“Have you seen the Picketts?” Bourne asked. “I thought he’d be back in Washington by now.”
“Have we seen the Picketts?” Cayetano rolled his eyes. “To be perfectly frank, only one. The large one.”
“You mustn’t tease about him, Cayetano. He is so desperately earnest, the poor man,” the duchess explained to all of them. “He is obsessed with his discovery of this—this Rubens trace—in the Velázquez. It is all very sweet, really. He came to see me to ask whether I would have any objections to allowing the press to refer to the painting as ‘The Pickett Troilus.’ I don’t know what he would do if anything ever happened to that painting. He apologized to me for having hired a firm of propagandists in the United States and a firm in London. Whatever for? I asked him. He told me this was the biggest single event of his life finding the coincidence of the two masters on the one canvas and that he must move to secure this authority everywhere, that it would make him the great Spanish art authority in the world if it were handled with discretion and tact.”
As the duchess spoke Eve had seemed to stop the transit of her martini con vodka in mid-air, then to return it to the table, careful not to take her eyes off the duchess. Bourne sat very still but gave no other sign that the duchess’s appeal had reached him.
The duchess continued. “Some American picture
magazine is flying photographers here from Lausanne, or anyway one photographer, and Mr. Pickett pleads with me to simply throw open Dos Cortes to him, and while he was there someone from the Duque de Luna’s office at Tourismo called and made the identical request for some German photographer who is coming down for a magazine in Munich and I decided then and there to tell them both that if they would take their pictures all at one time, or at least all in one day, I would permit it so I suppose the picture press of the world will shortly be publishing pictures of Mr. Pickett, Señor Velázquez and Herr Rubens shaking hands at the net. In the meantime it’s all for the great cause so cheers for art and the Picketts and culture generally and will one of you darling men please make discreet inquiries as to what the hell happened to that champagne?”
At that instant, through the doorway across the dining room, Señor Torte appeared, driving the magnums before him and, in no time at all, thoughts of drinking brassy stuff like martinis con vodka were spent in memory. Señor Torte enquired at exactly the right moment whether they would like to order food and Cayetano requested that he prepare anything at all in the style of S’Agaro, the meeting place of the great and near great on the Costa Brava, because that was what he had been instructed to say, he told the duchess.
“Who instructed you, lamb?” the duchess asked.
“Jaime Arias.”
“Oh. Well. Then, yes.”
“Who’s Jaime Arias?” Eve asked, looking slightly buzzed.
“He’s a newspaperman from Barcelona who collects teacups which gets him to believing that he’s an epicure, poor man.”
“What kind of teacups?”
“The kind with printing on them. Ones which say Hotel Dinkier-Plaza, he actually has one which says that, you know, and the Negresco in Nice. We had a few cups printed for him at Christmas last year because he’s a darling man. They say The Kremlin, Moscow, in red. They’ve become his most cherished pieces although, of course, he keeps them out of sight.”