his monologue on art seemed to be sterile. Why, art was nothing in comparison to what we were living! I had the feeling that he was younger than I. Perhaps I would grow tired of him very soon. Nonetheless, I envied the fact that he had something to live for.
He spoke to me of Aragon, of the desert of stones in which he had grown up. He described the white nuances of the Aragonese sky to me and I found myself, instead of in a pine wood flooded by moonlight, in thirsty, stony terrain whipped by wind and forever implacable.
“Whenever I feel distressed,” he said, “which is something that happens to me fairly often, I feel like an animal that is sinking into that Aragonese sand and wants to save itself, but does nothing except sink ever deeper. It pants, but the sand spills up over and drowns him.”
“You feel like an animal?”
“Like a dog.”
We walked for a while in silence. I wanted to tell him about the roe deer of my childhood and of the dreams in which it reappears. But when I looked at him, I ran once more into a wall of suspicion. I said nothing.
“The death of a person close to us makes us more human,” I said, instead of telling my story. But, did I really say it or do I just think I did? Yes, at the time I was silent. It was he who spoke.
“The death of a person close to us makes death intimate . . . It surprises us how we can live with so many deaths all around us.”
I wanted to protest, but he looked at me in such a way as to indicate that I had no right to talk of such things.
“Don Francisco, why have you come here?”
“If only I knew!”
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
I touched his hand.
“I am happy that you don’t know.”
Suddenly I felt like a hot air balloon from which ten bags of sand have been thrown and which goes up and up. To better concentrate on my thoughts, I asked him about his painting. He began to talk about it at length; I put my hand under his arm. He probably didn’t notice. Words and more words poured out of him.
“What a scandal it is to despise nature in comparison to the Greek statues, if the comparison is done by one who knows neither one thing nor the other. What form of statue can there be that was not copied from divine nature? No matter how excellent a professor he is who has made the copy, will he cease shouting that one is the work of god and the other of our miserable hands?”
I wasn’t listening to him with any particular interest, and if I asked him a question from time to time, it was to make conversation.
“Don Francisco, why don’t you seek inspiration in the Greek masters? Did they not create beauty?”
“I shall explain this at once to Your Highness.”
“My name is María Teresa.”
“Madam, he who wishes to distance himself from nature . . . ”
We were returning along the bank of the Guadalquivir. No, I didn’t want to distance myself from nature. I felt the muscles of his arms; I heard the melody of his words and the sounds of the flute.
The moon moved into the other half of the sky. Now it was shining like an old silver trinket. It pushed against my back and made me walk with a light step. Francisco sank into the wet sand of the riverbank.
The moon had set earlier. The servants were already asleep. I took him into the kitchen; he preferred a modest ambience, given that as a good Aragonese peasant, elegance and sumptuousness, dazzled him. We found some wine of an extremely dark red color, olives, and cheese. Francisco was hungry and I served him more and more wine. He made jokes, laughed. Now it was he who wasn’t listening to me. When he drank, he heard even less than he usually did. I also savored that rustic wine with a smattering of oak wood in its taste. Time came to a halt.
Suddenly, I noticed that the kitchen began to fill with a pinkish light. After blowing out the candle I went out into the garden and bathed in the first light of the sun, which still hadn’t come out. Francisco followed me with the carafe of wine and a glass. I sat on the swing that hung from the branches of two enormous eucalyptus