Adrian Nathan West
The Valley of the Fallen by Carlos Rojas, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman
The Valley of the Fallen by Carlos Rojas, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman.
Yale University Press,
296 pp., $26.00
An architectural folly of colossal proportions, combining the monumentalism of Albert Speer with the Catholic bombast of a narco graveyard, the Valley of the Fallen—a basilica, Benedictine abbey, and memorial surrounded by a three-thousand-acre national park near Madrid—aptly embodies many of the contradictions of historical memory in Spain. Planned as an homage to Nationalist soldiers who gave their lives in the “glorious crusade” to rescue Spain from a cabal of Marxists, Freemasons, and Jews, it is emblematic of the fascist ideal of unity by fiat: the bones of executed Republican soldiers mingle with those of their killers in its catacombs, and political prisoners participated in its construction as an act of state-sponsored “atonement.” A comparison of tourist brochures, one from its inauguration in 1959 and one from 2000, is instructive: the first speaks of “our heroes, just and upright men of immaculate purity, distinguished in name by the principles of the unity of religion, of human equality, of the exaltation of the Fatherland.” The second perpetuates a falsehood still current on the Spanish right, casting a conciliatory light on Francisco Franco, despite his dismissal of amnesty for Republicans as “suicidal” and his authorization of experiments on prisoners of war to search for a genetic susceptibility to communism: “The express desire of its founder was to build a final resting place for the fallen from both sides during the Civil War of 1936–1939.” Though never seen in Carlos Rojas’s 1978 novel The Valley of the Fallen, the complex looms over the narrative, and televised reports of the final days of its most notorious occupant, the Generalissimo himself, provide background noise to the two major strands of the plot: the life of Goya from 1800 to his death in 1828 and the attempt of Sandro Vasari, a Spanish professor returned home in the 1970s from his teaching position in America, to overcome his alcoholism and his grief at his divorce and the death of his children and to complete a biography of the painter from Zaragoza. Rojas, a writer of unusual range, now largely forgotten in his native Spain, last appeared in English in 2014, with the novel The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell. Its readers may recall Vasari’s conversation in that book with Ramón Ruiz Alonso, the Falangist politician instrumental in Lorca’s imprisonment and subsequent assassination. When Ruiz asks Vasari why he keeps returning to past miseries, disturbing the bones of the dead instead of letting them rest before the Final Judgment, Vasari replies that he wants to write not a book, but a dream. The oneiric plays a fundamental part in much of Rojas’s work, and in The Valley of the Fallen it is a permeable membrane through which history and the present communicate, at first in snatches, until reality breaks down and the characters grow aware of their frailty, their subservience to the hidden whims of a friend they call R., a standin for Rojas himself.
The novel opens with a painstaking description of what must be among the least flattering of commissioned portraits ever executed and paid for, Goya’s The Family of Carlos IV (1800). It is difficult to say who comes out worse in it: the sclerotic, bug-eyed king, who seems to have been poured like a pudding into his flamboyant finery; Queen María Luisa, of whom the best that can be said is that she looks less bad than in other likenesses, above all a grotesque one from 1789, in which her flesh has the cadaverous glow of boiled pork; or the infanta María Josefa, the king’s sister, by then close to death, with her vulturine face and an enormous—possibly artificial—mole on her right temple. Rojas follows a long tradition, dating back, perhaps, to Lion Feuchtwanger, of attributing “moral purpose” to Goya’s aloofness. The thought is a charming one, and an impeachment of the monarchy’s decadence would be consonant with the pessimism that suffuses his great etchings, The Caprices and The Disasters of War; but to all evidence, the family was pleased with the portrait, and Goya had worked too hard to attain the post of First Painter of the court to jeopardize his career through veiled sedition.
Compared with Velázquez’s Las Meninas, whose composition it echoes, The Family of Carlos IV lacks height and depth, giving it a claustrophobic feel. The figures crowd together and look outward, and some scholars have suggested that their eyes turn toward an unseen figure in the foreground: Manuel Godoy, the captain general, a sort of Iberian Talleyrand, who governed Spain as prime minister from 1792 to 1798 and again from 1801 to 1808. Godoy, paramour of the queen and rumored father of her two children, who stand at the center of the picture, appears explicitly in The Valley of the Fallen’s second chapter, in a capsule biography drawn from the work Sandro is composing. His presence also offers the first indication that the novel will break with conventional realism, when his specter in exile, sunning in the Tuileries and watching children play, comes to Goya in a dream in 1828. The episode is drawn from the memoirs of the journalist Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, who met Godoy more than a decade after Goya’s death.
The rent in chronology opens further when Goya, now an old man living in self-imposed exile in France, meets Claude-Ambroise Seurat, the Living Skeleton or l’anatomie vivante, whom Dickens described in an unsigned essay, “Fat People,” from 1864. Seurat reads Goya’s fortune, sees a woman in the distant future and a man who will write the painter’s life, then pleads, in apparent distress, “Give me ten sous, Maestro, so I can drink a thimbleful of burgundy.” The woman is Sandro’s lover, Marina, who is recovering from a botched abortion. The procedure leaves her infertile, and Sandro drinks himself into a stupor, scrawling down a phrase evoking Goya’s remorse at the thought of his seven children who died in infancy: “Saturn is my self-portrait and only tonight did I come to understand that.” The slow interpenetration of Sandro’s world with Goya’s allows Rojas to expound a dire vision of Spanish history as an eternal return of the same. In the words of the fictional Goya:
The truth is I began to think that our country, now so distant because of my exile, was alternatively the land of the monster or the moron. Their moments followed one after the other, ravaging or retarding our history. At times the bull attacked the puppets brutally and destroyed them, as if they hadn’t also been men. On other occasions, when it was the time of the simpletons, he meekly licked their hands when they offered them to be kissed.
Rojas’s chronicle hinges on two conflicts: the Peninsular War, from the brutal French invasion of Spain in 1808 to the restoration of the Felon King, Ferdinand VII, in 1814, cheered on by earnest shouts of “Long live our chains”; and the Spanish Civil War. Neither was a discrete event—the clash between centralization and devolution of powers, a point of contention between Republicans and Nationalists and the source of grievances in the Basque Country and Catalonia to this day, had its origins in domestic rebellions during the Thirty Years’ War. The civil war, in turn, is something of a misnomer, being the culmination of a series of uprisings and coups pitting liberals against selfstyled traditionalists that began with Charles III’s expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 and continued into the Carlist Wars of the nineteenth century, whose causes Miguel de Unamuno analyzed in his first novel, Peace in War.
To Rojas’s credit, he eschews the argumentum ad temperantiam that predominates in many contemporary accounts of the civil war in Spain, making clear that enlightened ideals lay to one side and reaction to the other. At the same time, he emphasizes a violent current in the country’s history that transcends ideology or creed. If the gruesomeness of The Disasters of War is hardly recognizable in present-day Spain, with its Michelin-starred restaurants, tower-lined beaches, and busloads of tourists clogging its photogenic squares, it is worth recalling the price at which this tranquility was achieved. The war’s end brought as many as 100,000 summary executions, the purging of the civil service, and huge numbers of people imprisoned; nearly half a million Republicans went into exile, and the failure of autarky, a sort of half-baked “Make Spain Great Again” program that pushed per capita wages below their 1900 level, would lead another two million of the country’s citizens to emigrate in the 1950s.
Women, now exalted in their “sacred” role as mothers and helpmeets to the state, were “liberated” from factory work and stripped of legal capacity. Divorce was outlawed, and husbands were granted the right to murder their wives in cases of adultery. The loss of human potential the country suffered, combined with four decades of statesponsored propaganda, the virtual excision of the left, and the persistence not only of fascist sympathizers but of direct descendants of Franco-era politicians at the highest levels of government, help explain the irresoluteness of Spain’s reckoning with its past after Franco’s death in 1975, and the fact that the most trenchant—and most honest—analyses of its postwar malaise have come from Anglo-American scholars and from exiles like Agustín Gómez Arcos, Juan Goytisolo, and Rojas himself.
If much of the history Rojas relates will prove unfamiliar to general readers, its broad outlines come through in his