The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico (3 page)

In the middle of the painting, high up, amidst clouds and sky, you shall paint a ship. Not a ship drawn from life, but something from a dream, an apparition, a chimera. For this must be all the ships that took my people across foreign seas to distant coasts or down to the bottomless depths of the ocean, and again all the dreams my people dreamt looking out from the cliffs where my country runs to meet the sea, the monsters they conjured up in their imaginations, and the fables, the fish, the dazzling birds, the mourning and the mirages. And at the same time it shall also be my own dreams, the dreams I inherited from ancestors and my own silent folly. The figurehead of this ship shall have a human form and you
must paint its features so that they seem alive and distantly recall my own. A smile may hover over them, but it must be faint, or vaguely mysterious: the incurable, subtle nostalgia of one who knows that all is vanity and that the winds which swell the sails of dreams are nothing but air, air, air.

My cards portray ladies in sumptuous brocades, coffers, castles, and graceful dancing skeletons, not at all macabre and well suited to predict triumph and death to delicate princes and hot-tempered emperors. I do not know why they are asking me to read the story of your life, which has not yet begun and which, given the many years that
separate it from this present time, I discern only through broad, perhaps deceptive, rents in the veil. Perhaps it is because, despite your humble birth, something in your destiny does partake of the nature of monarchs and lords: that profound sadness, like a fatal disease, of those who have the power to decide the fate of others, to dispose of men and women and to move, albeit for a noble end, poor human lives across the chessboard of destiny.

You will be born in the heart of Spain, in a village whose name is unclear to me, veiled in black gritty dust. Your father will plunge into the dark every morning at dawn, reappearing in the dead of night, heavy with filth and fatigue, to sleep like a rock in a bed near your own. Encased in the shell of her black dress, your mother will be silent and pious, terrified of what the future may bring. They will call you Dolores, out of Christian reverence, not realising that it foreshadows the nature of your life.

Your childhood will be utterly empty, I can see that clearly. You will not even wish for a doll, since never having seen one you will be unable to imagine such a thing, but simply cherish a vague longing for some kind of
human shape onto which to transfer your childhood terrors. Your mother, poor ignorant woman, doesn't know how to stitch together a doll, doesn't realise that children need games, only that what they most need is food.

You will grow up with the righteous anger of the poor when they refuse to become resigned. You will speak to those the powerful think of as dirt and you will teach them not to become like your mother. You will kindle hope in them, and they will follow you. For how could the poor live without hope?

You will suffer the threats of judges, the beatings of the police, the coarseness of prison guards, the contempt of servants. But you will be beautiful, impetuous, fearless, blazing with scorn. They will call you ‘La Pasionaria,' because of the fire that burns in your heart.

Then I see war. You will organise your people: on your side you will have the lowly and those who believe that men can be redeemed, and that will be your banner. You will even fight ideals similar to your own, because you consider them less perfect. And meanwhile the real enemy will defeat you. You will experience flight, exile,
one hiding place after another. You will live on silence and scraps of bread, and at sunset the long straight roads will point to the horizons of lands as alien to you as those you are fleeing. Haylofts and stables, ditches, unknown comrades, people's compassion – these will be your shelter.

You are dark-haired and dark-eyed, a woman of the South, accustomed to blond, sun-drenched landscapes dotted here and there with the white of Don Quixote's windmills. You will find refuge in the great plains of the East, where the deep winter cold cracks both earth and hearts. Your voice has a resonant Latin cadence with syllables ringing like the clapping of hands: you speak a language made for guitars, for festivals in orange groves, for challenges in the arena where brave, stupid men grapple with the beast. The tongue of the steppes will sound barbaric, but you will have to use it and forget your own. They will give you a medal; every year, in early May, you will sit on a platform beside taciturn men, likewise wearing medals, to watch soldiers in dress uniform file by below, while the wind spreads the red of the flags and the thundering notes of martial anthems played by
machines. You will be a veteran with a flat – reward in bricks and mortar for your heroism.

War again. Some are destined to witness death and destruction: you are one of them. In a city that will come to be called Stalingrad, death will snatch away the son you bore, the one real solace of your existence. My God, how quickly the years fly by in my cards, in your regrets! Only yesterday he was a child, and now he's a soldier already, and dead. You will be the heroic mother of a hero; your breast will bear another medal. The war is over now. Moscow. I see stealthy footsteps crossing the snow; a pure white blanket tries in vain to blur my cards; I sense the funereal gloom that pervades the city. At the carriage stops everyone stares at the ground to avoid meeting their neighbours' eyes.

And you too will be cautious, coming home of an evening, for this is a time of suspicion. At night you will wake with a start, soaked in sweat, unsure even of your own loyalty, since the worst heresy is to believe oneself in possession of the truth, and pride has brought down many. You will search your conscience long and hard.
And where have your old comrades gone meanwhile? Vanished, all of them. You will toss and turn in your bed, the sheets will be thorns. Outside it is bitterly cold; how can the pillow burn so fiercely?

‘All traitors?'

‘Every one.'

‘Even Francisco who laughed like a child and sang the
romancero?'

‘Even Francisco.'

‘Even El Campesino who wept with you over your dead?'

Yes, even El Campesino – he's cleaning Moscow's toilets now. And your short sleep will already be over. You are sitting on your bed, eyes fixed on the opposite wall, staring into the shadows (you always leave a night-light on – you can't bear the darkness). But what else can you do? South America is too far away, and besides, they won't let La Pasionaria leave the friendly confines of Russia.

So you decide you had better cling to your ideals, make of them an even stronger faith, stronger and stronger and
stronger still. And then after all, time is passing. Slowly, very slowly, but all things do pass. Men pass away, and suffering, and disasters. You too will almost be ready to pass away, and that will be a source of subtle, secret comfort. The meagre bun of your hair will turn white with age and grief. Your face will be dry, ascetic, with two deep hollows. Then your king will die too. You will take your place beside the coffin in the middle of the square, you will stay there day and night, always wholly yourself, silent, inflexible, your eyes always open, while a huge crowd files mutely by the embalmed corpse. Priestly, statuesque, carved in flint – ‘That is La Pasionaria,' people will think when they see you, and here and there a father will point you out to his son. While all the time, to stop yourself giving way to the panic and longing which have carved out tunnels in your soul, the hands in your lap will be twisting and twisting your handkerchief, until you tie it into a knot (how strange, why are you stroking that little round wad?). And in your mind you see a room that time has borne away, a bare iron bed and a tiny Dolores,
frightened and sick, with feverish eyes, calling plaintively,
‘Mamaita, el jugete. Mamaita, por favor, el jugete.'
And your mother gets up from her chair and makes you something like a doll, knotting together the corners of her brown handkerchief.

Many more years await you, but they will all be the same. Dolores Ibarruri, when you look in your mirror what you will see will be the image of La Pasionaria, it will never change.

Then one day, perhaps, you will read my letter. Or you won't read it, but this will not have the slightest importance, because you will be old, and everything will already have been. Because if life could go back and be different from what has been, it would annihilate time and the succession of cause and effect that is life itself, and that would be absurd. And my cards, Dolores, cannot change what, since it has to be, has already been.

Purple and swollen like secret flesh are the petals of Ogygia's flowers; brief showers, soft and warm, feed the bright green of her woods; no winter troubles the waters of her streams.

Barely the blink of an eye has passed since your departure, which seems so remote to you, and your voice calling farewell to me from the sea still wounds my divine hearing in this insuperable now. Every day I watch the sun's chariot race across the sky and I follow its course towards your west; I look at my white, unchanging hands; I trace a mark in the sand with a twig, as if adding a number to some futile reckoning, and then I erase it. And I have traced and erased many thousands of marks: the gesture is the same, the sand is the same, I am the same. And everything else.

But you live in change. Your hands have become bony, with protruding knuckles; the firm blue veins that ran across them have come to resemble the knotty rigging of
your ship, and if a child plays with them, the blue ropes slither away under the skin and the child laughs and measures the smallness of his own small hand against your palm. Then you lift him down from your knees and set him on the ground, because a memory of long ago has caught up with you and a shadow crosses your face. But he runs around you, shouting happily, and at once you pick him up again and sit him on the table in front of you. Something deep, something that can't be put into words takes place, and intuitively you grasp the substance of time in the transmission of the flesh.

But what is the substance of time, and how can it come into being, if everything is fixed, unchanging, one? At night I gaze at the spaces between the stars, I see the boundless void, and what overwhelms you humans and sweeps you away is only one fixed moment here, without beginning or end.

Oh, Odysseus, to be able to escape this eternal green! To be able to follow the leaves as they yellow and fall, to live the moment with them! To discover myself mortal!

I envy your old age and I long for it; that is the form my
love for you takes. And I dream of another Calypso, old and grey and feeble, and I dream of feeling my strength dwindling, of sensing every day that I am a little closer to the Great Circle where everything returns and revolves, of scattering the atoms that make up this woman's body I call Calypso. And yet here I remain, staring at the sea as it ebbs and flows, feeling no more than its reflection, suffering this weariness of being that devours me and will never be appeased – and the empty terror of eternity.

*
Dom Sebastião de Avis (1554–78) was the last Portuguese king of the house of Avis. He came to the throne while still a child, was raised in the atmosphere of mysticism, and came to believe he had been chosen by God to accomplish great deeds. Nursing his dream to subject all Barbary to his rule and extend his kingdom as far as the revered Palestine, he put together a huge army, made up mostly of adventurers and beggars, and set off on a crusade that was to spell disaster for Portugal. In August 1578, exhausted by the heat and a forced march across the desert, the Portuguese army was destroyed by the light cavalry of the Moors near Alcácer-Quibir. Sebastião had left no direct descendants; with his death, Portugal was subjected to foreign domination for the first and only time in history. Annexed to the crown of Spain by Philip II, it regained its independence in 1640 after a national rebellion.

*
Mademoiselle Lenormand was Napoleon's fortune-teller and one of the most celebrated French clairvoyants of her time.

A man, a woman, passion and unreasoned revenge are the characters of this story. The white pebbled banks of the River Mondego where it flows beneath Coimbra provide the setting. Time, which as a concept is essential to the tale, is of little importance in chronological terms: for the record, however, I will say that we are halfway through the fourteenth century.

The opening scenario smacks of the banal. Marriages of convenience dictated by diplomacy and the need to establish alliances were banal in those times. Likewise banal was the young prince Dom Pedro sitting in his palace awaiting the arrival of his betrothed, a noblewoman from nearby Spain. And in banal fashion, as custom and
tradition would have it, the nuptial delegation arrived: the future bride, her guards, her maids of honour. I would even venture to say that it was banal that the young prince should fall in love with one of the maids in waiting, the tender Inês de Castro, who in the manner of the time contemporary chroniclers and poets described as being slender of neck and rosy of cheek. Banal because, if it was common for a monarch to marry not a woman but a reason of state, it was equally common for him to satisfy his desires as a man with a woman to whom he was attracted for motives other than those of political convenience.

But the young Dom Pedro was a stubborn and determined monogamist; that is the first element in our story which is not banal. Fired by an exclusive and indivisible love for the tender Inês, Dom Pedro infringed the subtle canons of concealment and the prudent heedings of diplomacy. The marriage had been imposed on him for strictly dynastic reasons, and from a strictly dynastic point of view he did abide by it: but having produced the heir his father wanted of him, he moved together with Inês into a castle on the Mondego, and without
marrying made her his real spouse: which is the second element in our story which is not banal. At this point the cold violence of reason enters the scene in the shape of a pitiless executioner. The old king was a wise and prudent man and in loving his son loved not so much the son himself as the king his son would become. He gathered together his councillors of the realm and they suggested a remedy they felt would settle the problem once and for all: the elimination of this obstacle to the good of the state. While the prince was away, Dona Inês was put to death by the sword, as a chronicler tells us, in her house in Coimbra.