The Oldest Confession

  Dr Muñoz squeaked. The duchess said, “How enchanting!” Bourne stood beside the congressman and patted him gratefully on the shoulder, murmuring that he owed it to the world of art and artists to get that article into print at once.

  Mr. Pickett was dazed by what he had wrought. He mopped his forehead and whimpered, “What a day this has been for me! I believe with all my heart that today is my apogee in adventures with the Spanish masters.” He stared up at Bourne with troubled, gentle eyes. “Do you believe it would be amiss of me to cause influential repetition of a reference to this painting as ‘The Pickett Troilus’?”

  “I do not, sir,” Bourne responded with hearty vigor. “You have earned that right.”

  The bond of their glance was broken by what really amounted to an outcry from Dr. Muñoz. Words tumbled from him as though the full consideration had just reached him. As he spoke he advanced upon Mr. Pickett, his arms outstretched, as though seeking some hidden pit. “Do you really have faith in that opinion, Pickett? No, no! I have offended you. Please take no offense. I was utilizing rhetoric only. Think of it! Rubens and the blessed Velázquez in united genius upon one canvas! Oh, what a fortunate thing that you could come here, Pickett! Oh, my blessed saint, what a fortunate thing! We must tell the world of this! The world! And we must celebrate. Come along, come along! We must have some wine. This is so thrilling! I cannot remember when I have been so moved. Oh, we must have wine!”

  Some of his words got through to Mrs. Pickett. She clambered to her feet. “Yes. Wine. By all means we must have wine! Oh, Homer you have truly made a contribution today!”

  Dr. Muñoz prepared for bed, loosening his clothes then stepping out of them as they fell at his feet. He did not remove his lumpy cotton socks or his old-fashioned camisole of tattletale pink, but dropped a large, muslin nightshirt over whatever did not respond to gravity. The nightshirt was striped as his suits were striped, but not as hideously, in two shades of blue against one of green laid upon what had once been white. Tented, he sat at his dressing table and began the painstaking preparation of his Mustache Nourisher, a long, white piece of woolen cloth, two inches wide at its center then tapering out to strings at the ends which had cleverly patented slots for flat fastening. It resembled a money belt but it held vaseline and a Secret Ingredient which had been developed by a Captain Hugh Fitz-Moncrieff, of London, England, formerly a guards officer who had taken to sharing his secret with the readers of News of the World advertisements. Fitz-Moncrieff wore a magnificent mustache, thanks to the Nourisher, which resembled a busby laid crossways across the center of his nearly missing face. Dr. Muñoz, told not to expect overnight miracles from the device, had been applying it nightly to his pencil-line fringe for two months but as yet no intimidating bushiness had shown itself. As he prepared this follicle feeding he spoke to the cat who had curled up on the dressing table, the better to ignore its master.

  “What a world, Montes, what a stupid world,” the marqués drawled in his fashionable style, “and what braying fools we have as neighbors wherever we go. I use my talents with them like a very great actor in a very silly play or like a pulsating, feeling, vibrant man of flesh and blood who has found himself wandering, without escape, through page after page of a child’s repulsive storybook. Ugh! Aaah! Faugh, and other such expressions of distaste, disgust and disapproval. Thank heaven, for you, my friend.” He patted Montes who purred in Spanish. Muñoz bowed gravely at the figure before him in the mirror which lifted the white Nourisher to its face. “And I thank heaven for you, my friend, and your exquisite mind, and your beautiful, magnanimous forbearance.” He tied the strings at the back of his head in the prescribed, patented manner thus avoiding cleverly any annoying bumps which could disturb a sleeper who preferred to rest on his back.

  The week-end visit was not all art discovery and crusading. There was sport. Among them they shot over thirty-two hundred pigeons. The duchess and Cayetano rode a great deal. Before she had met Cayetano, the duchess had been an amateur rejoneadora much in demand at tientas throughout her own region and Andalusia. It is a talent which transmutes equitation into poetry. Afterwards, she abjured the bulls and everything, but one, to do with the bulls. A Laplander would relate more closely to fighting bulls than the duchess, after she met Cayetano.

  Bourne was a prisoner of his own schedule. He knew when Eve had left Córdoba. He followed her, in his mind, through and out of Seville. He saw her in his mind, as she left Granada in the large bus, with a book in her lap. Even though he had found everything he had wanted to the completion of his task in the library, Bourne stayed on in that large, dark comfortable room because Mrs. Pickett had become even more impossible and, of course, a steady diet of Mr. Pickett and Dr. Muñoz was simply out of the question. So, he stretched out on the leather couch, his feet higher than his head, and remained for hours on end in a semicataleptic state, thinking of Eve, thinking of the past, relating himself to the few things which were still important to him.

  Bourne had tried to know himself, which is a witless phrase indeed since it implies a psychical status quo, a state which would be irresponsible to the community. He did try to examine the seams of the soul he took off every night and, before it was sent back to the cleaners of forgetfulness, he did check its size against the expanding waistband of his infamy. Bourne could use a word like infamous because he sat in the bleachers with the other people when he measured himself. Try as he might, self-search as he would, he never could retrace his motivational spoor to the fork in the forest where he had become trapped by money.

  Bourne had gone to the right college after exactly the right preparatory school. He had received a superior status for his scholarship. He had, because of his strength and physical endurance, been active in sports. Upon graduation with a degree in business administration magna cum laude he had entered his father’s business where he had become more effective than his father within the first seven years. He had resigned in his eighth year, a full partner, earning one hundred and three thousand dollars per year with handsome expense benefits and an enlightened pension system which he had instituted himself. He could not continue in business because he saw it only as a continual distortion of honesty and material morality. It was as though a grain of glass, one of the slivers of ice from the palace of Andersen’s Snow Queen had entered his eyes then had worked its way into his heart. He had pointed out instance upon instance upon instance of dishonest, immoral practices by their firm, by all of their competitors, by all of their friends in business and in the professions which was accepted by all as common practice, and his father was appalled that Bourne could so twist facts to reach such a shocking and unfair set of conclusions.

  To Bourne there seemed to be nothing that they did or that was done in their world that was not dishonest, not decadent and immoral. To his father, Bourne was a sick man, a suddenly, rottenly, mentally sick man who had to be helped. Before he could help him, or organize the plot to bring in the doctors to help him, Bourne had vanished. He had taken substantial capital of his own with him and had left a childless wife, who had agreed with his father, behind him. It had been easy to vanish, easy to assume a totally new life, under a new name, in a new country.

  He had chosen crime as his career, because, in a manner entirely clear to him, he had known that the only way he could achieve a sense of honesty while doing what he had obviously been born to do, had been expensively trained to do, as had most all other men of his class, that is, to amass money, was to steal it. By the stated dishonesty of stealing money illegally, as opposed to the evaded dishonesty of acquiring it as he had among his father’s friends, Bourne felt clean, honest and integrated. It was creative work, in its limited way. It was diverting. He stole from anyone, not merely the rich. Robin Hood was not sentimental. It so happens that criminals do not steal from the poor because the poor have nothing to steal. As for stealing from the rich to give to the poor, Bourne felt that everyone did this nearly every day of their existence. Bourne was plagued by th
e thought of money although he was grateful to the need for it because that need had made him an honest man in a world he saw as being owned by uncommitted thieves.

  He could remember a certain contempt for money when he had first married. Then he had matured to the point where he could read contempt for money as fear of money. He was always stopped there. He could not go on very far beyond that point because he could not see what made him fear money. He had always had more than adequate amounts of it. But after he had recognized it as fear he had fostered the fear by indulging himself in having large sums of money on deposit in several countries, in the event of war in one part of the world, or the possible interruption of communications in another, although he could not think of one object he needed requiring a large amount of money to buy, except perhaps his first wife.

  Money was at the root of all of his so-called self-study so he never got very far with it. His present wife seemed to match her fear of money with his own, point for point at every point. As he knew her more and more he was horrified by the thought, when drunk, of witnessing his own feminine genes in an embodiment of their own. The way she spoke about money, thought about money, dwelt upon money was the way he did all of those things. When he was away from her on business, such as now, he would sit in the hotel apartment in Madrid with a whiskey bottle next to a tape recorder and play back all of the tapes she had not known he had recorded of them. He thought he was analyzing her in this way. He did not realize that because most of his waking conversations with her had to do with money in one way or another, that because she loved him, her answers had to do with money. It was as though he could not hear his own voice, only hers, which was how he had come to believe that she was obsessed with the idea of money and that she was some mortal extension of himself.

  Bourne got through the four days in a mild shock of anticlimax after the strain of effort on the first morning. He rode back to Madrid in the late afternoon in the white Mercedes with Cayetano. The duchess waved them off from the parapets in the set ritual of fairy tales. Cayetano was depressed, an unusual state for him.

  The Picketts were returned to Madrid in the Bentley with Dr. Muñoz driving. The jonquil cat Montes slept on his left shoulder. The car had not traveled sixty yards away from the walls of Dos Cortes when Mrs. Pickett began to sing the lead role in The Woman’s Opera, copyright Year One, by Lady Eve.

  “Homer?”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Isn’t the duchess married? I mean is she a widow or—”

  “Of course she’s married. What kind of a question is that?”

  “Then where is he?”

  “Who?”

  “The husband. The duke.”

  Dr. Muñoz cooperated, shrugging. “Paris, perhaps. Or Hollywood. Or in a sanitorium in Switzerland. He’s a very old man.”

  “What about Cayetano?” Mrs. Pickett asked mildly.

  “What about him?” answered her husband not realizing then or ever that much of the conversation he and his wife exchanged was made up almost entirely by questions on both sides.

  “Isn’t he awfully young?”

  “Young for what?”

  “Do you mean to sit here and say that you didn’t notice that they were madly in love with each other?”

  “Marianne, will you please stop this?”

  “Are you going to tell me he isn’t wildly attractive?”

  “What has that got to do with anything?”

  “Is he a gigolo?”

  Dr. Muñoz hit the brakes involuntarily, jolting the cat Montes into abrupt indignation, stared at Mrs. Pickett blankly, then recovered. Mr. Pickett swung his massive façade full-rudder to starboard to face his wife and he seemed to rise like a gun turret. “A gigolo?” Mr. Pickett demanded. “He is the greatest bullfighter of his generation!”

  Dr. Muñoz made a sharp, repetitious clicking sound of disapproval. “He is perhaps, I will say that he is judged by many experts to be, perhaps, the greatest bullfighter who ever lived.”

  A copy of the Dos Cortes art catalogue reposed in Mrs. Pickett’s lap. Her hand closed over it. Her face had drained white with humiliation. “A bullfighter? Cayetano is a bullfighter?” She took up the heavy catalogue like a truncheon and began to rain blows on her husband’s head, cursing cubic oaths then weeping with rage.

  They had left Avila behind. Cayetano took the car too fast down out of the mountains but his coordination was so fit that Bourne felt no nervousness. The painting was in his case behind them. He had forgotten Cayetano’s earlier symptoms of depression with the press of his own plans. Eve would be at the hotel when he returned to Madrid which would be within the hour. She would leave tomorrow with the merchandise. Once through the Spanish customs, the rest was nothing. The French were not sufficiently interested in Spanish paintings to ransack baggage to search for them and he would see to it that Eve wore extreme décolletage.

  Neither he nor Cayetano had spoken since Segovia. Cayetano stared at the road ahead. They left the mountain. The road flew straight ahead of them for miles across the plains of Castille.

  Cayetano’s smile, ready and willing at all hours of the day and night, was the desperate smile of a man who pleads indiscriminately with everyone to like him. Unsuccessful actors frequently let themselves be seen this naked but actors, compared to matadors, are two-dimensional performers no matter how good their writers are. Matadors, good and bad, have every dimension there is in the show business because flops make them bleed and many times make them die. Cayetano’s great art as a torero gave him an especial nakedness because his exalted reputation made the crowd insist that he risk more. This made him increasingly aware that there could be very little time left to be liked and reassured, or disliked and ignored, and he had formed a habit for preferring the former.

  His profession had done for him what churches had failed to do for other men. To have a deep faith in the absolute imminence of one’s own death is to respect life more. Cayetano’s obligation had been stated for him by his great-grandfather, his grandfather and his father. He could have continued on with a solid professional respect for death and an enlarged capacity for life until his turn came to be killed or to retire honorably. Unfortunately, he had met the duchess and they had marked each other for each other. It was unfortunate because she was a victim of so many different varieties of honor.

  Life became too much of a familiar to him. His death became too much of a familiar to the duchess. This had continued for six years. She had petitioned for an annulment of her marriage five years before. The matter had been taken by a French attorney as far as an ecclesiastical court in Munich, but several technical reasons had stood in the way. Four years before she had offered to ignore her marriage vows if he would leave the bulls. To the duchess, this was an offer to sacrifice her soul throughout eternity to save his body. Since her soul had far more reality to him than his body, in the sense that he knew it would be possible to avoid the horns but that it would be impossible, if she gave in to him, to avoid damnation, he refused by telling her that the bulls were the only way he knew to live. Two years before Cayetano had decided that he should murder the duke, but Bourne kept him drunk for four days and after that, in his weakness, he saw that would have been the wrong solution.

  When it became unbearable for both of them, Blanca turned to her king for support and went to prison. This had happened twice in six years for a sentence of one year at each time. All of the six years tended to give the duchess a tendency to terrible headaches and a dread of continuing to live. It gave Cayetano a thirst for cognac and a desperate need for relief from the sudden fear of living.

  He hit the brakes. The car screamed into a stop. Cayetano gripped the top of the steering wheel and yelled from deep in his belly. He yelled twice like a manso bull then put his head forward between his hands and did not move. Sweat glistened thickly on his neck.

  Bourne waited for five minutes, not moving or speaking, then he lighted two cigarettes. When Cayetano pulled his head back Bourne passe
d one of the cigarettes to him and said, “There’s a fonda a few kilometres along this road. Would you mind if we stopped for a while? I have a thirst.”

  Cayetano grunted. The car moved along, this time almost sedately. It was a cool, bracing spring evening.

  Bourne listened while the assistant manager chatted about the action in the house while Bourne had been away. The assistant manager was called Gonzalo Elek. He was a very small, extraordinarily agreeable, perpetually smiling, pencil-line mustached man with limpid, large brown eyes and the whitest teeth. Years before he had inherited a wardrobe from a suicide in the old Ritz Hotel in New York where he had been employed. It consisted of fourteen suits of the finest weave and cut, comprising a model for every occasion. They had hardly been worn, but they had been styled just before World War I. They ran to four-button jackets and peg-top trousers and whispered elegance. Fourteen suits permitted Señor Elek to wear each suit only twice each month which brought him much joy. He would never wear the wardrobe out if he continued to live into his eighty-ninth year, he had explained to Bourne.