VALLS HEARD THE distant ripples of the applause that had closed Altea’s speech as it merged into the orchestra’s next number. Altea, “his great friend and esteemed colleague”, who for years had been trying to stab him in the back: that message from the Generalissimo excusing his absence must have been music to his ears. Valls cursed Altea and his bunch of hyenas, that pack of new centurions already called “the poisoned flowers” by more than one: they had sprouted in the regime’s shadows and were beginning to fill key positions in the administration. Most of them were prowling about the garden right now, drinking his champagne and nibbling his canapés. Sniffing his blood. Valls put the cigarette he was holding to his lips, but there was just a hint of ash left on it. Vicente, his chief personal bodyguard, was observing him from the other end of the corridor and walked over to offer him one of his own.
“Thanks, Vicente.”
“Congratulations, Don Mauricio,” his loyal guard dog intoned.
Valls nodded, smiling bitterly to himself. Vicente, ever faithful and respectful, returned to his place at the end of the passage, where, if one didn’t look carefully, he seemed to melt into the wallpaper.
Valls took a first drag and observed the wide corridor that opened before him through the curtain of his cigarette smoke. Mercedes called it “the portrait gallery”. The corridor circled the entire third floor and was filled with paintings and sculptures that lent it an air of a grand museum bereft of viewers. Lerma, the curator of the Prado Museum, who took care of Valls’s collection, was always reminding him that he shouldn’t smoke there and that sunlight could damage the paintings. Valls took a second drag on his cigarette to Lerma’s health. He realized that what Lerma was trying to say, though he didn’t have the nerve, was that those pieces deserved better than to be confined in a private home, however splendid the setting, or however powerful its owner; their natural place was a museum where they could be admired and enjoyed by the public, those insignificant souls who clapped in ceremonies and queued up in funerals.
Valls sometimes enjoyed sitting on one of the plush armchairs dotted around the portrait gallery to admire his treasures. Many of the works had been lent to him, or simply seized from the private collections of citizens who had ended up on the wrong side of the conflict. Others came from museums and palaces under his ministry’s jurisdiction, by way of a permanent loan. He liked to recall those summer afternoons when little Mercedes – who wasn’t even ten at the time – sat on his knees and listened to the stories hidden behind each one of those marvels. Valls took refuge in those memories, in his daughter’s look of fascination when she heard him talk about Sorolla and Zurbarán, about Goya and Velázquez.
*
More than once Valls had wanted to believe that while he could sit there, ensconced in the light and dreamlike quality of the paintings, those days shared with Mercedes, days of glory and fulfilment, would never slip away. For some time now Mercedes hadn’t come to spend the afternoon with him and listen to his masterly accounts of the golden age of Spanish painting, but the very act of seeking refuge in that gallery still comforted him: it made him forget that Mercedes was now a woman he had not recognized in her formal dress, dancing under the gaze of greed and desire, suspicion and malice. Soon, very soon, he would no longer be able to protect her from that world of shadows that didn’t deserve her, a world that lurked, baring its teeth, beyond the walls of the house.
He quietly finished his cigarette and stood up. The hum of the band and of the voices in the garden could just be made out behind the drawn curtains. Without turning his head, he walked over to the staircase leading to the tower. Vicente, emerging from the dark, followed him, his footsteps barely audible behind Valls’s back.