These are the last few lines of my Prado diary, much to my regret.
After the visit to El Escorial and my talk with Father Juan Luis, there was barely enough time for me to get back to the Prado and confront Fovel with the monk’s piece of paper. Could Fovel, my “ghost,” be a Rosicrucian? An immortal? Or would he have some explanation that even an imagination as active as mine could not have anticipated? I was just one step away from solving the great puzzle of my Prado Master, or so I thought.
As it happened, by the time I found myself back in those galleries, I had learned the text by heart. It consisted of a handful of simple but ambiguous verses which, through several readings, and without my meaning to, had turned themselves into a song that I now could not get out of my head, and I repeated it silently like a spell that could somehow be used against the man in the black coat.
All in vain.
To my despair, that Sunday, January 13, Luis Fovel did not appear in the Prado’s galleries, and so I was unable to present him with my gift. Nor did he appear the next Tuesday. Or Thursday, when I went back for a third time. Despondent, I spent Friday wandering from gallery to gallery until closing time, but still no Fovel. After all my waiting, I found myself imploring the heavens to let either Fovel or even de Prada find me once more, as they had before, so that I could have the chance to ask them at least one last question.
But nothing happened.
During those frustrating days, I kept in touch only with Father Juan Luis, who continued to encourage me not to give up.
“Something’s happened,” I complained. “It’s never taken him so long to appear!”
“Never mind; he’ll come. Keep at it! Find him!”
But it turned out the old monk was wrong, too.
I spent the rest of the month going to the museum each day. I went after class, bringing each day’s assignments and working on them, sitting on a bench in Gallery A and keeping a lookout from the corner of my eye for whoever should pass by in a black coat. It was a complete waste of time.
Finally, on Thursday, the last day of the month, when I called El Escorial to give an account of my predictably fruitless week, a stranger’s voice answered, bringing my Alice in Wonderland existence to an abrupt end. It was as if the floor had just disappeared from under my feet, taking with it everything that had happened in the last two months.
“I’m afraid Father Castresana passed away early this morning,” said the voice, sounding genuinely sorry. “Were you a student of his?”
I hung up without saying anything.
I had never felt so helpless. Seemingly overnight, I had lost not only my Master of the Prado but also the one person to whom I’d divulged the whole of my own story of these events. And the pain I felt over the death of the good Father Castresana lodged itself in my soul like an enormous splinter.
In the midst of all this, and to add to my sense of solitude, Marina and I had spoken no more about the matter; in fact, we hadn’t seen each other again. Her father had gotten his way, ending our relationship practically before it had begun. After a while I heard that she had started seeing a guy who was four years older, and I . . . The truth is that, sad and disoriented, I tended to my other needs and devoted myself to my studies and to my assignments for the magazine.
For a while, I tried to overcome the periodic waves of anger I felt over the whole business. Thinking back to how it had all started, and recalling the phrase, when the student is ready, the teacher appears, I’d become enraged, frustrated at not knowing how I could have been chosen like that only to be discarded so soon after and left to my fate. At the core of it all, I couldn’t accept the fact that Fovel had simply disappeared without giving me the chance to see him one last time.
In this way, little by little, worn away by the steady erosion of time’s passing, Luis Fovel and the text of his little puzzle lost themselves in the oblivion of my notebooks. Only God knows why I now suddenly felt the need to retrieve them and share them with whoever has managed to make it to these last pages. Twenty years later I’m still no wiser as to why all of this should have happened to me, only this time, having put it all in writing for the world to see, I hold out the faint hope that someone out there will finally figure out the meaning of the puzzle that Father Juan Luis entrusted to me at El Escorial the last time I saw him. Who can say? Perhaps this patient reader will manage to find the mysterious Master and put to him the question that I could not.
If that should happen, please let me know.
For now, all I have to prove to myself that this was not merely a dream are these lines, left forgotten for so long in the pages of an old book in the library of El Escorial:
Do not pursue me
Though I hold the key
You seek my name
Unable to see
All of these paintings
I’ve kept from the start
Know that my source
Lies in their art
Against all your efforts
With tooth and with nail
I will keep rending
That terrible veil
Giordano, Titian, Goya
Velázquez, Bosch, and Brueghel
They all went in pursuit
Of that desire universal
Square up to death
In fate put your trust
With eyes opened you know
I will do what I must