“You were with Lucia Bosè and you didn’t call me?”
Marina’s green eyes gave off angry sparks. We’d met in one of our favorite cafés in Moncloa to see each other one last time before vacation. She was leaving the next day for Pamplona, and I was off to Castellón. Back then in 1990, though it wasn’t so long ago, communication was more complicated. Cell phones were a new luxury, and long-distance calls around Spain still cost a fortune. It was better to meet and tell each other everything in person.
Fool that I was, the first thing I did was to tell her the story of my visit to Lucia Bosè in Turégano, not leaving out a single detail. What a mistake! It turned out that she and her father were great fans of the actress, and that Marina would have given her right arm for a chance to meet her. Hurt and furious, she trotted out a long list of things I didn’t know about Lucia: how she worked with all the great Italian directors—Antonioni, De Santis, Fellini—and even about her infamous fights with the bullfighter Dominguín, who wouldn’t even let her drive alone around Madrid in the fifties.
But if she made me feel guilty for not having thought to bring her on my visit, she also knew how to take advantage of my guilt, placing a small sheaf of paper in front of me.
“What’s this?” I asked her.
“While you were off on your travels, I was doing research in the newspaper archives,” she replied, her tone dripping with venom.
“You? What were you looking for?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
“For your ghost, of course,” she replied triumphantly.
I stared at her, saying nothing.
We used to talk a lot about my interest in the supernatural, and she had made it clear right from the first that she didn’t want to know too much about it, that she found it frightening. She considered herself a good Catholic, attended Mass on Sundays, had her Communion, and felt she should keep those kinds of things at arm’s length. But now, with all that was going on with me, she was letting her guard down a little. I realized that some of what I’d told her on the outing to El Escorial had continued to gnaw at her, and she’d decided to get some answers for herself.
“You remember how you told me that you thought that the guy who got you started on all this was probably a ghost?”
I gazed out the café window, ignoring the pieces of marzipan that were sitting untouched on the table between us. She continued.
“Remember? How you thought that you were the only one who could see him? How there was no one else around when he was there? How you felt that cold sensation when he touched you? And remember how you told me that he sort of faded away when that group of tourists came in?”
“I told you all that?”
“You sure did! It’s true, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Of course.”
“Well then, if you’re right, and your strange Master is actually a ghost or spirit of some kind, then it must come from someone who died in the Prado and who is still wandering around there, right?”
Her lack of guile made me grin. She went on.
“And since there can’t have been a lot of people who have died in there, I went to the archives to see if I could figure out who it was.”
“His name is Luis Fovel. He’s a doctor.” I reminded her.
“Come on! He lied to you! I couldn’t find any Doctor Fovel who died in the Prado. No one by that name has died in Madrid in the last forty years. But,” she smiled mysteriously, “I do have a couple of other candidates for you.”
I don’t know why, but I had no trouble picturing Marina dressed to kill and sitting at one of those nasty wooden desks in the national newspaper archive on Tirso de Molina while a blue-smocked attendant brought her a stack of leather-bound clippings. No one would have stood in her way.
She went on, oblivious to my little imaginings. “The most recent one died in 1961.” She rummaged through her stack of papers and extracted one, laying it in front of me. “Here. You see?”
“You can’t be serious . . .” I said.
“Would you please read it?” she said crisply.
Marina had given me a copy of a page from the newspaper ABC, dated February 26, 1961. The headline read, burglary foiled at prado.
I picked it up and began reading it in earnest, my curiosity now piqued. According to the story, at about one in the morning on February 25, the museum’s caretaker and his wife had been in their bedroom on the grounds when they had heard two loud bangs outside in the street. They rushed out to see what had happened and came upon a seriously injured man with a wire cable tied around his waist. His body was twisted up, and he was having trouble breathing.
It looked as if he had toppled from the façade of the museum onto Calle Ruiz de Alarcón. Apparently, he had fallen from the roof while trying to climb into the building. The article stated that he died just before the ambulance arrived.
“Keep reading,” Marina urged. “I also brought copies of the story from El Caso and La Vanguardia.
The El Caso story had more details. “died trying to rob the prado”, blared the headline. The paper had done quite a good job of reconstructing the thief’s actions. It looked as if his objective had been a skylight over the Italian gallery. The interloper’s plan had been to lower himself through the skylight and make his way to the Goya gallery, where he would cut the two Majas from their frames, wrap them in brown paper, and make his way back out with them. Unfortunately for him, everything fell apart because of one misstep. The unlucky thief’s name was Eduardo Rancaño Peñagaricano, and he had lived in Vallecas for over eighteen years and been a frequent visitor to the Prado. He had no criminal record whatsoever.
“No way,” I muttered to myself. “It can’t be him; he’s too young.”
“Are you sure?” asked Marina.
“Absolutely.” I declared.
“Too bad they don’t have a picture of him,” she said. “Then you could have made sure—”
“I don’t need to,” I interrupted, “I know it’s not him, Marina. Doctor Fovel is not a young guy.”
She looked at me as if she was actually enjoying herself.
“Okay,” she said finally. “I did say that I had another candidate. This one is more educated, and older, and he has an elegance which fits in very well with your doctor. He was a poet named Teodosio Vesteiro Torres. He committed suicide in front of the museum over a hundred years ago.”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
“He was part of a well-known circle of friends of the Galician writer Emilia Pardo Bazán, and even published some books himself.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Do you want to know what I found or not?” she retorted.
I nodded.
“Teodosio Vesteiro loved art. He was born in Vigo in 1847 and when he was twelve his family sent him to the Tuy seminary in Pontevedra. He must have been pretty smart, because while he was still a student, they put him in charge of the humanities department at his seminary, and that was by order of the bishop of the diocese. Unfortunately, it didn’t last. At twenty-four, without yet having attained the priesthood, he left the seminary and made his way to Madrid to earn a living.”
“Hmm.” Something there didn’t fit. “Do you know why he left religious life?”
“It sounds like reason and doctrine collided in his studies. They say that he began to see things in a different light. Who knows? Perhaps there was a girl involved, though I couldn’t find anything about that.”
“Interesting. What happened afterward?”
“His life in Madrid was no easier than it had been in Pontevedra. He earned a living giving music lessons, and began to write like crazy. The little free time he had he spent in the Prado or in gatherings with other poets. His great accomplishment was a five-volume biographical encyclopedia on famous Galicians, but he also wrote treatises on theology and philosophy, two plays, two books of poems, two books of legends—he even composed a zarzuela, an operetta!”
“What a talent!” I said. “Do you know why he killed himself?”
“No. He didn’t leave a note or any kind of explanation. In fact, he burned a lot of his papers just before his fateful decision. The only reason that we know as much as we do is thanks to some of his friends, who sent letters to the newspapers, blaming the influence Goethe and Rousseau had on Teodosio, as well as the romantic, defeatist atmosphere that prevailed among intellectuals of the time. Did you know that back then, several great thinkers opted for suicide rather than to have to live a mundane, material life? Larra and Nerval were the best known, but there were dozens more.”
“Did you say he killed himself in the museum itself?”
“Not in the museum—in front of the museum, in a part called the Salón del Prado. It was around one in the morning on June 13, 1876, on his twenty-ninth birthday.”
“So he was young, too,” I mused.
“He shot himself. Listen to how this paper describes it; it’s really shocking: ‘Teodosio died on his knees, his eyes rolling up in his head, his left hand clutching his heart.’1 They forgot to add with a revolver in his right hand.”
“What a shame.”
“I know. It had a big impact on Madrid’s Galician community,” she continued. “Even a year later they still talked about the death at the Prado. A few of his friends and colleagues—Pardo Bazán, Francisco Añon, Benito Vicetto, and some others—got together and wrote a book of poems in his memory titled A Wreath in Memory of the Brilliant Galician Writer and Poet, Teodosio Vesteiro Torres.2 That caused quite a stir.”
“How come?” I asked, intrigued.
“Can’t you guess? They were honoring a suicide! In the strict Catholic Spain of those days, anyone who took his own life would be a pariah. They couldn’t even be buried in a cemetery. Reading all these articles, Javier, you get a real sense of how many people had a difficult time with Teodosio’s death.”
I was leafing absentmindedly through her bundle of papers when Marina stopped me.
“Look—there’s a photo! I found it in the book of poems.”
Even in the photocopy you could see some detail—wide forehead, aquiline nose, neat beard. “That’s not him either,” I finally replied.
“Are you positive?”
I gave her a stern look, but it was mixed with tenderness. I really didn’t want to offend her again. I realized what a great deal of effort she had gone to on my account, and it meant more to me than she could know.
“I am,” I began, “for two reasons—one: Fovel looks to be around sixty, and I doubt that I’d confuse him with someone half his age. Second: Even if some of Teodosio’s features are similar to Fovel’s, those ears are definitely not, nor is the chin.”
“Well in that case,” she replied, “there’s only one way left for us to find out his real identity.” Undaunted, Marina took hold of my hand to emphasize what she was about to say. “Ask him!”
I was shocked. “Ask him what? If he’s a ghost? If his name is really Teodosio?”
“Fine,” she smiled. “If you won’t, then take me with you. Since you neglected to take me to meet Lucia Bosè, the least you can do is introduce me to this Master of yours.”
I put my other hand on top of hers. “You know, I think you’re crazy.”