The Oldest Confession

  North Americans would never be able to comprehend, because in this one area they had become the Carrie Nations of the SPCA, why men wept in the streets of Spain, or why holy candles burned in private houses in Peru, or why tens of thousands of Mexicans went into mourning, or why movie theatres in Venezuela were packed to show, again and again, newsreels of a man whose name most North Americans had never heard. Throughout that world plain people felt they had lost one who had given them, not delight, but a grim, transcendent excitement; a pageant of death, and of courage, death’s enemy.

  The duchess sat in a straight-backed chair looking into the darkness through the open window and across the Retiro into the third morning after that afternoon. She had not slept. She had hardly stirred. To force her servants to leave her alone with her past she would pretend to sip the broth which they had brought and pretend to eat. Her black eyes were more protuberant in a bony, haggard face.

  Many people had come to the house from Madrid and Spain; from Rome, from London, from Cannes and Paris. Bourne, desperate with guilt and grief, had been turned away four times. The telephone had rung hundreds of times to be told by Pablo, the major-domo, that the duchess was not there. The cooks wept. The chambermaids wept. The footmen were red-eyed. Josefina, who was Pablo’s wife and the duchess’s body servant, looked crazy as though she were revealing the face of the duchess’s soul while the duchess, having forgotten she had a mind or a body, sat staring out across the night.

  As the false dawn of the third day appeared, the day before his funeral, the day before he would be taken far to the south to be buried forever, the duchess was at last able to clutch her mind and her memory leaving the place she sat in and the time she was trapped in and the body in which she was contained with such pain. She became a fussy and finicky curator in dimensional time, shaking the cushions of memory, poking into display cases of sensation and old hurt, sweeping out ropy desires from the far corners of the museum of her life with Cayetano. She had willed herself to become a satellite of her shining past, circling the planet which was her memory; speeding with chilling loneliness through a vacuum, separated from all the substance she ached for by the gravitational force of death.

  She became a learned scholar who taught herself her own dreams. She read and reread memory beginning at the afternoon in Sevilla when she had first met him, and devoured each nuance of their exchange as the light of her need struck it, going over the minutes of her life with him as some other marooned scholar might read and reread the pages of the single book he had salvaged from a wrecked ship.

  She had held so strongly to the fleeing life as it had fled. Now she struggled to lock it within herself after it had flown. Reason had no part in this. Need was all and everything. She concentrated upon the state of oneness with the immediate instant she and Cayetano had shared, allowed one instant to cross her grateful memory at a time; one memory at a time, one pearl becoming a necklace, the necklace combining into one pearl; each instant brief and evanescent, not measurable in time and, being timeless, becoming eternal as well as instantaneous.

  Time had no relationship to the new reality which trembled at the timeless instant of her evoked perception. The rest of the time continuum which had happened and was even then happening to all others beyond herself and Cayetano, became unreal figments of imagination.

  She would begin to read her book in her memory in Sevilla, reading slowly, savoring each gesture and touch, hoarding the growing sharpness of tactile sensation, finding wondrous new meanings each time, never tiring of the story any more than a child who, to itself, lives it forever, would tire of a haunting fairy tale. Each time she went through the book she always went through from start to finish, never doubling back when she reached a snag but making a note to investigate that snag or new memory or blank space the next time she started from the beginning of the story to work her way to the ineradicable end.

  On the morning of the third day something had happened to these sequences. She grew more and more puzzled then confused each time she reached the last fraction of the story. There was one puzzling inconsistency which kept striking out at her, which kept interrupting the even flow of her narrative to herself. She tried to push it out of her place in time, but it must have been wrapped in her sanity. It would not leave.

  In her mind, the only reality, it was that sunny, loving day when they had all met for luncheon at the Commodore. She started this sequence again, against all rules, as one would start a home movie projector at a favored place. She and Eve Bourne were riding in the tiny elevator with the small redhaired, freckled page boy. They swept into the dining room, and she noticed the golden-brown murals showing the horsemen and the hunters this time.

  She relived the movement and sound of the luncheon with happiness. She loved the Bournes. Eve was a beautiful, warm and genuine girl. Jaime was good, solid and dependable, with a brilliant mind. They gave love to each other and to their friends. Cayetano had felt it and he had loved them too. She watched Cayetano and heard him talk. The great glacier which was growing to be a large blocking mass each time began to form.

  “This is a week of miracles, really. I ask everyone here. Who is the most improbable Spaniard you can think of who would announce that he was going to attend a bullfight?” She heard herself reply, “My cousin, el doctor, Victoriano Muñoz, Marqués de Villalba.” She had imitated Victoriano’s voice and everyone had laughed merrily.

  She pulled herself forward through what had happened and what was happening again. She saw Cayetano lean over and kiss her hand, and her left hand opened beseechingly as she relived the sensation. Then he said in a voice which had become louder and louder and louder each time he said it again, “He called me this morning and asked me if I would kill in front of Tendido Two next week on my first bull because they were the only seats he could get and he promised to take Mrs. Pickett and he is afraid she won’t last out more than one bull so he wants to make sure of that by making it as awful as possible.”

  It had been as awful as possible.

  Some voice began to shout questions at her from a great distance within her head. Why had Victoriano agreed to go to any corrida? What about Mrs. Pickett could have persuaded him to overcome such a tremendous, cherished prejudice? He had contempt for Mrs. Pickett. He had never spoken more than ten words to her in any given day at any time they had been thrown together. If she had caught fire before his eyes he would have rung for a servant to help her to put the fire out, no more. Why would he take such a woman to the corrida when he detested the corrida to an even greater degree than he felt indifference to the woman? The sound, disembodied and nonexistent then, which had come from a radio in an automobile which had passed under her open window during that first night after that afternoon came up to her now and entwined itself around Victoriano, and Mrs. Pickett, and herself. The sound was a radio voice which told with mournful wonderment that at the instant of the death of the great Cayetano Jiminez, Francisco Goya’s great masterpiece “The Second of May” had been stolen from the Prado. She did not know, nor would she have cared, that that was the only announcement ever made about the theft of the Goya, that the story was killed forever within eight seconds after that announcement by highest order and all inquiries blandly denied, the denials saying the announcement had never been made; denials by the radio, the press and the government and most of all by the Prado.

  Jean Marie, locked in the suite where he had copied the Goya, dreamed that one brutalized agent de police had him by the hair, another by his right arm and both of them kept striking him with large riot sticks quite like the riot sticks the gendarmes had used on the Place de la Concorde during the Stavisky riots when he had been a boy, as they dragged him through black, frightening gates of what he was sure could only be a prison.

  At eleven forty on the morning of the fourth day which was Saturday, the day of Cayetano’s funeral and the day which had been set for his wedding, the duchess’s servants sat, silent and expressionless, in the foyer of Dr. Muñoz?
?? apartment. When they heard his key scratching into the lock Pablo arose and opened the door, surprising him.

  “Eh!” Dr. Muñoz exclaimed, while the cat Montes stared at the two servants from under his arm, more surprised than he, his eyes more demanding of an explanation. “Ah. Well. Pablo. Why are you here? And Josefina. Did the duchess send you? Of course. Good heavens, has there been more bad news?”

  Josefina stared at him malevolently. Pablo stood aside, clearing the entrance. “My duchess waits for you in the salon, marqués,” Pablo said.

  “The salon! Well! How long has she been waiting, for heaven’s sake?”

  Pablo took out a large, gold pocket watch and snapped open the case. He studied it carefully. “Eighteen hours and forty minutes, marqués,” he said gravely.

  “What? What the devil has happened?” he said sharply. He stared at Pablo then at Josefina but got nothing. He moved rapidly across the foyer and down the corridor to the tall, arched doorways which led into the Moorish room. He hesitated at the closed doors, biting his lower lip nervously and pill-rolling his fingers on the balls of his thumbs. At last he turned the latch and entered.

  The duchess sat, facing the door, framed by the light which filled the sky beyond the large windows behind her, erect in one of the high-backed, heavy council chairs. Involuntarily, the marqués glanced up at the paintings which were illuminated on the wall.

  The brilliantly colored carpet beneath his feet seemed as soft as sand. He could not remember sensing that before. Everything which he had ceased to be aware of in that room seemed now to take on deeper dimensions. The lights flooding the paintings shone more brilliantly as though caught in the lights from the eyes of the Archangel Michael. The atmosphere between himself and the duchess seemed pelagic. He knew he must not shout but he feared that no sound could be heard this morning in that room.

  The duchess watched him come in as one looks at a bellman whom one has been told approaches with a message. She saw him as he was on that day, at that instant, not as she had always seen him: an extension of their childhood, as a somewhat pitiable, resentful child held together with the wires of his pride and with the strength of his forefathers’ failings. All at once she was saddened to see that he was a comically effete man wearing, not clothes but some kind of flagrant plumage as he peered forward through himself as though he were standing well behind himself. His greased hair shone like stars reflected in soup. His poor mustache seemed like the vibrissae of a spaded mouse.

  His crenelated mouth moved without opening.

  “Good day, Victoriano. Did you have a pleasant journey?”

  “Journey? What d’you mean?”

  “You’ve been gone for four days the porter said so I called that nice Castanos man at the Comisario de Policía and in no time at all they were able to tell me that you were in Santiago de Compostela.”

  “Oh. Yes. Wonderful place for a rest, you know. Great peace. That sort of thing.”

  “Indeed, yes.”

  “I hope you have been comfortable here?”

  “Thank you, Victoriano.”

  “If there is anything you need—”

  “Nothing, thank you.”

  He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Blanca, I can explain the presence of these paintings.”

  “Sit down,” she said. “Here.” She touched the heavy council chair beside her. He seemed to need to think about that for a moment but then he walked to the chair uncertainly and sat down.

  “Pablo!” the duchess called out in her strong, sweet voice. The man appeared instantly in the doorway. The duchess turned to Dr. Muñoz and said, “You will think I have simply taken over your house.”

  “It is your house, my duchess,” he answered gallantly as Pablo crossed behind him and brought a loop of strong cord over his head and bound him to the chair, across the chest, torso, legs then one arm. The duchess watched with the amount of simulated interest one consumes watching someone else’s child play a short piece upon the piano. The marqués neither cried out nor spoke while he was being bound. When Pablo had finished, and he did a rapid and thorough job, he stood silently by, waiting for further instructions from his mistress. “Thank you, Pablo,” she said and he left the room.

  Muñoz tried to appear as natural as possible under the conditions but above all tried not to look at her. His right arm was free. He lifted it slowly and regarded it as though it were a new object, strangely shaped, as though it were something he had once read about but had never seen. The cat Montes walked up his bound left arm, across his shoulders, then down his fragile chest on the right side, to settle down for a splendid sleep, after a long journey, in his lap.

  The duchess, wearing black, sat with her hands in her lap, in repose. Her hair looked like what is left on the ground after a fire in a cornfield. Part of it was yellow and part of it was black. Her popping eyes, black and congenitally intense, watched him serenely. She wore many rubies against the black. At last her long white fingers moved, discovering him, and she began to speak again quietly.

  “I telephoned Mrs. Pickett. She told me she had not been to the corrida with you.”

  “Blanca—”

  “I was surprised to learn, as you will be I know, that she had never been to a corrida and yet it always seems to me that when she isn’t hinting at what men would secretly like to do to her she talks about nothing but bullfighting. It must still remain a romantic thing to her, like jousting or falconry.”

  “What I insist upon establishing here and now, Blanca, is the fact, the simple fact that—”

  “I cannot explain to you why those particular words of Cayetano’s about your attending last Tuesday’s corrida stayed in my mind.”

  “Did he mention that?”

  “He made it very amusing, as usual. He told us how you had called him and had so urgently requested that he kill the first bull in front of Tendido Two just to get the agony over for Mrs. Pickett that much more quickly.”

  She looked at him brightly. She had so much pain in her eyes. He moved as well as he could tied as he was telling himself that he must never look into her eyes again or he would never be able to sleep again. He shut his eyes for an instant trying to project his consciousness forward to some impossible moment of sleep. “Would you mind if I smoked?” he heard his cousin say.

  “Blanca—” He started and stopped. “Nothing in this world is certain. That is to say at the last moment Mrs. Pickett decided not to go to the corrida.”

  “Ah, that explains it.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  “But when I saw you outside the plaza you told me she was with you.” This wasn’t true, of course, but she wanted to hear his answer.

  “I couldn’t have.”

  “You did though.”

  “Actually I didn’t hear a word you said over the noise of that awful crowd. I just nodded, I suppose, or said something inane. She wasn’t with me. She called at the very last moment and canceled everything.”

  “Then I must be mistaken.”

  “You most certainly are, Blanca dear. But no harm is done where none is meant.”

  “The old sayings are the best.” The duchess flipped at the silver lighter in her hand and lighted the long cigarette she held between her square white teeth. She assayed a smoke ring and, in the stillness of the air in that room, no opened doors, no opened windows, it evolved beautifully. “When I spoke with Mrs. Pickett this morning she told me that you have never invited her to a corrida. She didn’t even imagine that you would want to invite her anywhere. Not at any time. She told me that she hadn’t spoken with you since you drove them back to Madrid from my place and that was some time ago.”

  “That is outrageous!”

  “My questioning her?”

  “How could she dare to tell a lie like that?”

  “Breeding, I suppose,” the duchess said. “‘No manners, no conscience’ is a good old saying, too.” She puffed at the cigarette and touched the ruby pendant hanging at her wh
ite throat.

  “She must be mad. You will certainly admit that she behaves like a madwoman.”

  “Do I behave like a madwoman?”

  “Of course you don’t. His constant movement under the ropes in the chair had gotten his left shoulder quite low and he seemed unable to right himself again, but he was careful not to move too noticeably and call attention to it.

  “Why did you go to the corrida last Tuesday, Victoriano?”

  “Why did I go?”

  “Come now, pet. Please don’t tell me now that I didn’t see you outside the plaza.”

  “Of course I won’t, but I’m not sure I understand the question.”

  “Forgive me. I asked you that because there is no Madrileño more famous for his detestation of the bulls than you.”

  “Now, one moment, Blanca. Just one moment. I want this to be clear now and forever—”

  “Forever.” She tipped her head back to stare at the ceiling. “If someone could only tell us how long is forever.”

  “Pardon?”

  She looked at him again, but he looked away quickly. “Nothing,” she said. “Go on.”

  “You’ve been asking me some extraordinary questions. And not only to me, Blanca.” His voice had the aggrieved indignation of a pupil who has been unjustly told he must remain after school. He looked piercingly at her right shoulder and indicated that he would not tolerate this sort of thing, even from her.

  “One question.”

  “Ask me anything. You know you can ask me anything,” he replied.

  “Why have you not made any mention of the somewhat unusual, not to say eccentric, fact that my servant has entered this room and has trussed you into your own chair?”

  “I—what is there to say? It is all most embarrassing. I mean, if I were to acknowledge this condition you speak of, I said to myself, I should be required to become very angry with you, Blanca. We are old and dear friends. I mean, since childhood. I could not under any circumstances, that is to say I thought that—” With his free right hand he brushed confusedly at the empty air.