Caesar or Nothing by Pio Baroja
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Pio Baroja >> Caesar or Nothing
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When he had gone, the grave Spaniard with the sour face, said to Caesar:
"That chap is like the dandies here; that's why he imitates them so
well."
Afterwards Cortés talked about his studies in painting; he didn't get
on well, he had no money, and anyway Rome didn't please him at all.
Everything seemed wrong to him, absurd, ridiculous.
Caesar, after he had said good-bye to him, murmured: "The truth is that
we Spaniards are impossible people."
XVI
THE PORTRAIT OF A POPE
Two or three days later Caesar met the Spaniard Cortés in the Piazza
Colonna. They bowed. The thin, sour-looking painter was walking with a
beardless young German, red and snub-nosed. This young man was a painter
too, Cortés said; he wore a green hat with a cock's feather, a blue
cape, thick eyeglasses, big boots, and had a certain air of being a
blond Chinaman.
"Would you like to come to the Doria gallery with us?" asked Cortés.
"What is there to see there?"
"A stupendous portrait by Velázquez."
"I warn you that I know nothing about pictures."
"Nobody does," Cortés declared roundly. "Everybody says what he thinks."
"Is the gallery near here?"
"Yes, just a step."
In company with Cortés and the German with the green hat with the cock's
feather, Caesar went to the Piazza del Collegio Romano, where the Doria
palace is. They saw a lot of pictures which didn't seem any better to
Caesar than those in the antique shops and the pawnbrokers', but which
drew learned commentaries from the German. Then Cortés took them to a
cabinet hung in green and lighted by a skylight. There was nothing to
be seen in the cabinet except the portrait of the Pope. In order that
people might look at it comfortably, a sofa had been installed facing
it.
"Is this the Velázquez portrait?" asked Caesar.
"This is it."
Caesar looked at it carefully. "That man had eaten and drunk well before
his portrait was painted," said Caesar; "his face is congested."
"It is extraordinary!" exclaimed Cortés. "It is something to see, the
way this is done. What boldness! Everything is red, the cape, the cap,
the curtains in the background.... What a man!"
The German aired his opinions in his own language, and took out a
notebook and pencil and wrote some notes.
"What sort of man was this?" asked Caesar, whom the technical side of
painting did not preoccupy, as it did Cortés.
"They say he was a dull man, who lived under a woman's domination."
"The great thing is," murmured Caesar, "how the painter has left him
here alive. It seems as if we had come in here to salute him, and he
was waiting for us to speak. Those clear eyes are questioning us. It is
curious."
"Not curious," exclaimed Cortés, "but admirable."
"For me it is more curious than admirable. There is something brutal in
this Pope; through his grey beard, which is so thin, you can see his
projecting chin. The good gentleman was of a marked prognathism, a type
of degeneration, indifference, intellectual torpor, and nevertheless, he
reached the top. Perhaps in the Church it's the same as in water, only
corks float."
_LEGEND AND HISTORY_
Caesar went out of the cabinet, leaving the German and Cortés seated on
the sofa, absorbed in the picture; he looked at various paintings in the
gallery, went back, and sat down, beside the artists.
"This portrait," he said presently, "is like history by the side of
legend. All the other paintings in the gallery are legend, 'folk-lore,'
as I believe one calls it. This one is history."
"That's what it is. It is truth," agreed Cortés.
"Yes, but there are people who do not like the truth, my friend. I tell
you: this is a man of flesh, somewhat enigmatic, like nature herself,
and with arteries in which blood flows; this is a man who breathes and
digests, and not merely a pleasant abstraction; you, who understand such
things, will tell me that the drawing is perfect, and the colour such
as it was in reality; but how about the person who doesn't ask for
reality?"
"Stendhal, the writer, was affected that way by this picture," said
Cortés; "he was shocked at its being hung among masterpieces."
"He found it bad, no doubt."
"Very bad?"
"Was this Stendhal English?"
"No, French."
"Ah, then, you needn't be surprised. A Frenchman has no obligation to
understand anything that's not French."
"Nevertheless he was an intelligent man."
"Did he perhaps have a good deal of veneration?"
"No, he boasted of not having any."
"Doubtless he did have without suspecting it. With a man who had no
veneration, what difference would it make whether there was one bad
thing among a lot of good ones?"
The German with the green hat, who understood something of the
conversation, was indignant at Caesar's irreverent ideas. He asked him
if he understood Latin, and Caesar told him no, and then, in a strange
gibberish, half Latin and half Italian, he let loose a series of facts,
dates, and numbers. Then he asserted that all artistic things of great
merit were German: Greece. Rome, Gothic architecture, the Italian
Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, Velázquez, all German.
The snub-nosed young person, with his cape and his green hat with its
cock-feather, did not let a mouse escape from his German mouse-trap.
The data of the befeathered German were too much for Caesar, and he took
his leave of the painters.
XVII
EVIL DAYS
Accompanied by Kennedy, Caesar called repeatedly on the most auspicious
members of the French clerical element living in Rome, and found persons
more cultivated than among the rough Spanish monks; but, as was natural,
nobody gave him any useful information offering the possibility of his
putting his financial talents to the proof.
"Something must turn up," he used to say to himself, "and at the least
opening we will dive into the work."
Caesar kept gathering notes about people who had connections in Spain
with the Black party in Rome; he called several times on Father
Herreros, despite his uncle's prohibition, and succeeded in getting the
monk to write to the Marquesa de Montsagro, asking if there were no
means of making Caesar Moneada, Cardinal Fort's nephew, Conservative
Deputy for her district.
The Marquesa wrote back that it was impossible; the Conservative Deputy
for the district was very popular and a man with large properties there.
When Holy Week was over, Laura and the Countess Brenda and her daughter
decided to spend a while at Florence, and invited Caesar to accompany
them; but he was quite out of harmony with the Brenda lady, and said
that he had to stay on in Rome.
A few days later Mme. Dawson and her daughters left, and the San
Martinos and the Marchesa Sciacca; and an avalanche of English people
and Germans, armed with their red Baedekers, took the hotel by storm.
Susanna Marchmont had gone to spend some days at Corfu.
In less than a week Caesar remained alone, knowing nobody in the hotel,
and despite his believing that he was going to be perfectly indifferent
about this, he felt deserted and sad. The influence of the springtime
also affected him. The deep blue sky, cloudless, dense, dark, made him
languish. Instead of entertaining himself with something or other, he
did scarcely anything all day long but walk.
_TWO ABSURD MEN_
"I have continually near me in the hotel," wrote Caesar to Alzugaray,
"two absurd fellows: one is one of those stout red Germans with a square
head; the other a fine slim Norwegian. The German, who is a captain in
some service or other, is a restless man, always busy about what the
devil I don't know. He is constantly carrying about trunks and boxes,
with the aid of a sorrowful valet, dressed in black, who appears to
detest his position. The captain must devote the morning to doing
gymnastics, for I hear him from my room, which is next to his, jumping
and dropping weights on the floor, each of which must weigh half a ton,
to judge by the noise they make.
"He does all this to vocal commands, and when some feat doesn't go right
he reprimands himself.
"This German isn't still a moment; he opens the salon door, crosses the
room, stands at the window, takes up a paper, puts it down. He is a type
that makes me nervous.
"The Norwegian at first appeared to be a reasonable man, somewhat
sullen. He looked frowningly at me, and I watched him equally
frowningly, and took him for a thinker, an Ibsenite whose imagination
was lost among the ice of his own country. Now and then I would see
him walking up and down the corridor, rubbing his hands together so
continuously and so frantically that they made a noise like bones.
"Suddenly, this gentleman is transformed as if by magic; he begins to
joke with the servants, he seizes a chair and dances with it, and the
other day I saw him alone in the salon marching around with a paper hat
on his head, like children playing soldiers, and blowing on a cornet,
also made of paper." I stared at him in amazement, he smiled like a
child, and asked if he was disturbing me.
"'No, no, not in the least,' I told him.
"I have asked in the hotel if this man is crazy, and they have told me
that he is not, but is a professor, a man of science, who is known to
have these strange fits of gaiety.
"Another of the Norwegian's doings has been to compose a serenade, with
a vulgar melody that would disgust you, and which he has dedicated '_A
la bella Italia_.' He wrote the Italian words himself, but as he knows
no music, he had a pianist come here and write out his serenade. What
he especially wants is that it should be full of sentiment; and so the
pianist arranged it with directions and many pauses, which satisfied
the Norwegian. Almost every night the serenade '_A la bella Italia_'
is sung. Somebody who wants to amuse himself goes to the piano, the
Norwegian strikes a languid attitude and chants his serenade. Sometimes
he goes in front of the piano, sometimes behind, but invariably he hears
the storm of applause when it ends, and he bows with great gusto.
"I don't know whether it's the other people who are laughing at him, or
he who is laughing at the others.
"The other day he said to me in his macaronic Italian:
"'Mr. Spaniard, I have good eyesight, good hearing, a good sense of
smell, and ... lots of sentiment.'
"I didn't exactly understand what he meant me to think, and I didn't pay
any attention to him.
"It seems that the Norwegian is going away soon, and as the day of his
departure approaches, he grows funereal."
_THE SADNESS OF LIFE_
"I don't know why I don't go away," Caesar wrote to his friend another
time. "When I go out in the evening and see the ochre-coloured houses on
both sides and the blue sky above, a horrible sadness takes me. These
spring days oppress me, make me want to weep; it seems to me it would
be better to be dead, leaving no tomb or name or other ridiculous and
disagreeable thing, but disappearing into the air or the sea. It
doesn't seem natural; but I have never been so happy as one time when I
was in Paris sick, alone and with a fever. I was in an hotel room and
my window looked into the garden of a fine house, where I could see the
tops of the trees; and I transformed them into a virgin forest, wherein
marvellous adventures happened to me.
"Since then I have often thought that things are probably neither good
nor bad, neither sad nor happy, in themselves; he who has sound, normal
nerves, and a brain equally sound, reflects the things around him like a
good mirror, and feels with comfort the impression of his conformity to
nature; nowadays we who have nerves all upset and brains probably upset
too, form deceptive reflections. And so, that time in Paris, sick and
shut in, I was happy; and here, sound and strong, when toward nightfall,
I look at the splendid skies, the palaces, the yellow walls that take an
extraordinary tone, I feel that I am one of the most miserable men on
the planet...."
_ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON_
His lack of tranquillity led Caesar to make absurd resolutions which he
didn't carry out.
One Sunday in the beginning of April, he went out into the street,
disposed to take a walk outside of Rome, following the road anywhere it
led. A hard, fine rain was falling, the sky was grey, the air mild, the
streets were full of puddles, the shops closed; a few flower merchants
were offering branches of almond in blossom.
Caesar was very depressed. He went into a church to get out of the rain.
The church was full; there were many people in the centre of it; he
didn't know what they were doing. Doubtless they were gathered there for
some reason, although Caesar didn't understand what. Caesar sat down on
a bench, worn out; he would have liked to listen to organ music, to a
boy choir. No ideas occurred to him but sentimental ones. Some time
passed, and a priest began to preach. Caesar got up and went into the
street.
"I must get rid of these miserable impressions, get back to noble ideas.
I must fight this sentimental leprosy."
He started to walk with long strides through the sad, empty streets.
He went toward the river and met Kennedy, who was coming back, he told
him, from the studio of a sculptor friend of his.
"You look like desolation. What has happened to you?"
"Nothing, but I am in a perfectly hellish humour."
"I am melancholy too. It must be the weather. Let's take a walk."
They went along the bank of the Tiber. Full of clay, more turbid than
ever, and very high between the white embankments hemming it in, the
river looked like a big sewer.
"This is not the 'coeruleus Tibris' that Virgil speaks of in the
Aeneld, which presented itself to Aeneas in the form of an ancient man
with his head crowned with roses," said Kennedy.
"No. This is a horrible river," Caesar opined.
They followed the shore, passed the Castel Sant' Angelo and the bridge
with the statues.
From the embankment, to the right, they could now see narrow lanes, sunk
almost below the level of the river. On the other bank a new, white
edifice towered in the rain.
They went as far as the Piazza d'Armi, and then came back at nightfall
to Rome. The rain was gradually ceasing and the sky looked less
threatening. A file of greenish gaslights followed the river-wall and
then crossed over the bridge.
They walked to the Piazza del Popólo and through the Via Babuino to the
Piazza di Spagna.
"Would you like to go to a Benedictine abbey tomorrow?" asked Kennedy.
"All right."
"And if you are still melancholy, we will leave you there."
_THE ABBEY_
The next day, after lunch, Kennedy and Caesar went to visit the abbey of
Sant' Anselmo on the Aventine. The abbot, Hildebrand, was a friend
of Kennedy's, and like him an Englishman.
They took a carriage and Kennedy told it to stop at the church of Santa
Sabina.
"It is still too early to go to the abbey. Let us look at this church,
which is the best preserved of all the old Roman ones."
They entered the church; but it was so cold there that Caesar went out
again directly and waited in the porch. There was a man there selling
rosaries and photographs who spoke scarcely any Italian or French, but
did speak Spanish. Probably he was a Jew.
Caesar asked him where they manufactured those religious toys, and the
pedlar told him in Westphalia.
Kennedy went to look at a picture by Sassoferrato, which is in one of
the chapels, and meanwhile the rosary-seller showed the church door to
Caesar and explained the different bas-reliefs, cut in cypress wood by
Greek artists of the V Century, and representing scenes from the Old and
New Testaments.
Kennedy came back, they got into the carriage again, and they drove to
the Benedictine abbey.
"Is the abbot Hildebrandus here?" asked Kennedy.
Out came the abbot, a man of about fifty, with a gold cross on his
breast. They exchanged a few friendly words, and the superior showed
them the convent.
The refectory was clean and very spacious; the long table of shining
wood; the floor made of mosaic. The crypt held a statue, which Caesar
assumed must be of Sant' Anselmo. The church was severe, without
ornaments, without pictures; it had a primitive air, with its columns of
fine granite that looked like marble. A monk was playing the harmonium,
and in the opaque veiled light, the thin music gave a strange impression
of something quite outside this life.
Afterwards they crossed a large court with palm-trees. They went up to
the second story, and down a corridor with cells, each of which had on
the lintel the name of the patron saint of the respective monk. Each
door had a card with the name of the occupant of the room.
It looked more like a bath-house than a monastery. The cells were
comfortable inside, without any air of sadness; each held a bed, a
divan, and a small bookcase.
By a window at the end of the passage, one could see, far away, the
Alban Hills, looking like a blue mountain-range, half hidden in white
haze, and nearby one could see the trees in the Protestant cemetery and
the pyramid of Caďus Cestius close to them.
Caesar felt a sort of deep repugnance for the people shut up here,
remote from life and protected from it by a lot of things.
"The man who is playing the harmonium in this church with its opaque
light, is a coward," he said to himself. "One must live and struggle in
the open air, among men, in the midst of their passions and hatreds,
even though one's miserable nerves quiver and tremble."
After showing them the monastery, the abbot Hildebrand took them to his
study, where he worked at revising ancient translations of the Bible. He
had photographic copies of all the Latin texts and he was collating them
with the original.
They talked of the progress of the Church, and the abbot commented with
some contempt on the worldly success of the Jesuit churches, with their
saints who serve as well to get husbands and rich wives as to bring
winning numbers in the lottery.
Before going out, they went to a window, at the other end of the
corridor from where they had looked out before. Below them they could
see the Tiber as far as the Ripa harbour; opposite, the heights of the
Janiculum, and further, Saint Peter's.
When they went out, Kennedy said to Caesar:
"What devilish effect has the abbey produced in you, that you are so
much gayer than when we went in?"
"It has confirmed me in my idea, which I had lost for a few days."
"What idea is that?"
"That we must not defend ourselves in this life, but attack, always
attack."
"And now you are contented at having found it again?"
"Yes."
_PIRANESI'S GARDEN_
"I am glad, because you have such a pitiable air when you are sad. Would
you like to go to the Priory of Malta, which is only a step from here?"
"Good."
They went down in the carriage to the Priory of Malta. They knocked at
the gate and a woman came out who knew Kennedy, and who told them to
wait a moment and she would open the church.
"Here," said Kennedy, "you have all that remains of the famous Order of
Saint John of Jerusalem. That anti-historic man Bonaparte rooted it
out of Malta. The Order attempted to establish itself in Catania, and
afterwards at Ferrara, and finally took refuge here. Now it has no
property left, and all that remains are its memories and its archives."
"That is how our descendants will see our Holy Mother the Church. In
Chicago or Boston some traveller will find an abandoned chapel, and will
ask: 'What is this? 'And they will tell him: 'This is what remains of
the Catholic Church.'"
"Don't talk like an Homais," said Kennedy.
"I don't know who Homais is," retorted Caesar.
"An atheistical druggist in Flaubert's novel, _Madame Bovary. Haven't
you read it?"
"Yes; I have a vague idea that I have read it. A very heavy thing; yes,
... I think I have read it."
The woman opened the door and they went into the church. It was small,
overcharged with ornaments. They saw the tomb of Bishop Spinelli and
Giotto's Virgin, and then went into a hall gay with red flags with a
white cross, on whose walls they could read the names of the Grand
Masters of the Order of Malta. The majority of the names were French and
Polish. Two or three were Spanish, and among them that of Caesar Borgia.
"Your countryman and namesake was also a Grand Master of Malta," said
Kennedy.
"So it seems," replied Caesar with indifference. "I see that you speak
with contempt of that extraordinary man. Is he not congenial to you?"
"The fact is I don't know his history."
"Really?"
"Yes, really."
"How strange! We must go tomorrow to the Borgia Apartment in the
Vatican."
"Good."
They saw the model of an ancient galley which was in the same hall, and
went out through the church into the garden planned by Piranesi.
The woman showed them a very old palm, with a hole in it made by a
hand-grenade in the year '49. It had remained that way more than half
a century, and it was only a few days since the trunk of the palm had
broken.
From the garden they went, by a path between trees, to the bastion of
Paul III, a little terrace, from which they could see the Tiber at their
feet, and opposite the panorama of Rome and its environs, in the light
of a beautiful spring sunshine....
XVIII
CAESAR BORGIA'S MOTTO, "AUT CAESAR, AUT NIHIL"
_THE BORGIAS_
The next day was one of the days for visiting the Borgia Apartment.
Caesar and Kennedy met in the Piazza di San Pietro, went into the
Vatican museum, and walked by a series of stairs and passageways to the
Gallery of Inscriptions.
Then they went down to a hall, at whose door there were guards dressed
in slashed clothes, which were parti-coloured, red, yellow, and black.
Some of them carried lances and others swords.
"Why are the guards here dressed differently?" asked Caesar.
"Because this belongs to the Dominions of the Pope."
"And what kind of guards are these?"
"These are pontifical Swiss guards."
"They look comic-opera enough," said Caesar.
"My dear man, don't say that. This costume was designed by no one less
than Michelangelo."
"All right. At that time they probably looked very well, but now they
have a theatrical effect."
"It is because you have no veneration. If you were reverential, they
would look wonderful to you."
"Very well, let us wait and see whether reverence will not spring up in
me. Now, you go on and explain what there is here."
"This first room, the Hall of Audience, or of the Popes, does not
contain anything notable, as you see," said Kennedy; "the five we are
coming to later, have been restored, but are still the same as at the
time when your countryman Alexander VI was Pope. All five were decorated
by Pinturicchio and his pupils, and all with reference to the Borgias.
The Borgias have their history, not well known in all its details, and
their legend, which is more extensive and more picturesque. Really, it
is not easy to distinguish one from the other."
"Let's have the history and the legend mixed."
"I will give you a résumé in a few words. Alfonso Borja was a Valencian,
born at Játiba; he was secretary to the King or Aragon; then Bishop of
Valencia, later Cardinal, and lastly Pope, by the name of Calixtus III.
While Calixtus lives, the Spaniards are all-powerful in Rome. Calixtus
protects his nephews, sons of his sister Isabel and a Valencian named
Lanzol or Lenzol. These nephews drop their original name and take their
mother's, Italianizing its spelling to Borgia. Their uncle, the Pope,
appoints the elder, Don Pedro Luis, Captain of the Church; the second,
Don Rodríguez...."
"Don Rodríguez?" said Caesar. "In Spanish you can't say Don Rodríguez."
"Gregorovius calls him that."
"Then Gregorovius, no doubt, knew no Spanish."
"In Latin he is called Rodericus."
"Then it should be Don Rodrigo."
"All right, Rodrigo. Well, this Don Rodrigo, also from Játiba, his uncle
makes a Cardinal, and at the death of Pedro Luis, he calls him to
Rome. Rodrigo has had several children before becoming a Cardinal, and
apparently he feels no great enthusiasm for ecclesiastical dignities;
but when he finds himself in Rome, the ambition to be Pope assails him,
and at the death of Innocent VIII, he buys the tiara? Is it legend or
history that he bought the tiara? That is not clear. Now we will go in
and see the portrait of Rodrigo Borgia, who in the series of Popes,
bears the name Alexander VI."
_ALEXANDER VI AND HIS BROTHER_
Kennedy and Caesar entered the first room, the Hall of the Mysteries,
and the Englishman stopped in front of a picture of the Resurrection.
"Here you have Alexander VI, on his knees, adoring Christ who is leaving
the tomb. He is the type of a Southerner; he has a hooked nose, a long
head, tonsured, a narrow forehead, thick lips, a heavy beard, a strong
neck, and small chubby hands. He wears a papal robe of gold, covered
with jewels; the tiara is on the ground beside him. Of the soldiers,
it is supposed that the one asleep by the sepulchre and the one who is
waking and rising up, pulling himself to his knees by the aid of his
lance, are two of the Pope's sons, Caesar and the Duke of Gandia. I
rather believe that the little soldier with the lance is a woman,
perhaps Lucrezia. How does your countryman strike you, my friend?"
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