thought that he was as serious as if he was risking his life for something. I spent time with my guests, but never stopped feeling those two needles that had introduced themselves under my skin. And once again I went to stand in the circle that he was in. There was his wife, my husband, Doña Tadea Arias, the French ambassador, and I don’t know who else. Doña Tadea Arias asked him whose portrait he was painting just then. He spun out the answer, his eyes fixed on me, his body turned directly toward where I was. He talked and talked and I knew that, apart from me, he didn’t notice anybody else. And I? All of them put together were nothing but figures painted on a backdrop; he was the only living being. I felt as if I had been transformed into air and fire.
Abruptly, the French ambassador cut the tense cords that had begun to form between this man and me, which trembled with each breath we took. The ambassador asked me something. How impolite, I thought! And Francisco, which was the man’s name, went over to the table on my left and—by coincidence? out of ignorance?—picked up my crystal glass, my grandfather’s gift to me, raised it to his lips, filled his mouth with water, and without saying a single word, turned and left without so much as saying farewell. His wife, Josefa, looked at me as if apologizing for a third person whose behavior is incomprehensible to her, and I followed him rapidly to the door.
María, where did you put my glass? Hey, old woman, what’s going on in your head? You’re not dying like I am, so think for a bit. Woman, the one of cut glass, the one I took everywhere with me, to Seville and Sanlúcar, to Paris and Piedrahíta. Put a little water in it for me, come on! María, you old thing, older than Methuselah, do you remember how you told me off during the journey when I went to see Francisco for the first time? I laughed at your old woman’s prejudices, and you took out your cross to show it to me, like a knight shows his sword to the enemy, like an inquisitor the Holy Scriptures to a heretic. The cross, your only lover, the cross that could never be unfaithful to you as could a flesh-and-blood man. The carriage advanced in leaps and bounds along the uneven pavement of the neighborhood in which Francisco lived, and I wanted to whack you over the head with that cross in order to stop the trembling which had gotten into me.
During the months that followed the reception at my house, not a week passed—but what am I saying? Not a day passed without me looking for the chambermaid to ask her if she didn’t have a message for me from the only man in Spain. “Je ne sais où me sauver,” Madame de Sévigné, ma soeur spirituelle, she who was the sister of all women, had written a century before. I too had no idea where I could flee so as not to think about him.
He must have forgotten me. But the Duchess of Alba does not allow people to forget her. When she chooses a man, she makes him hers. And he ends up being hers, always. He stops belonging to himself in order to belong to her. When the Duchess of Alba feels an inclination toward someone, you can do whatever you wish to flee from her, but you will end up feeling such voluptuousness for her that you will never look at another woman again; you will end up the prisoner of a passion so great that all other women in the world come together into just one: the Duchess of Alba. María Teresa Cayetana de Alba is not a woman. She is fate itself.
You brought me to him, María, clutching your cross, but at once you were put at ease. Above the fireplace the painter had an image of little Pilar, Pilarica, as he called her. During my interview with him in his studio, I saw that little picture through a gap in the door and I told you in a whisper to ask the royal painter to hand it over to you. I didn’t want my activities to be watched by the fire in the severe eyes of the Aragonese Virgin.
I didn’t even look at the painter. I let my eyes wander over the jottings