with so many children around her; or perhaps it wasn't a goblet, but the large tassel from her belt. She bordered on the plump, or maybe not (but she was certainly wide), her expression was rather absent and certainly not lively, although there was perhaps a remnant there of calm almost indifferent determination. She had slightly bovine, almost prominent eyes, very fine eyebrows, which looked as if they had been penciled in, and rather thin and unalluring lips; her best feature was possibly her lustrous un-lined rosy skin, so smooth and taut on her cheeks that it looked as if it might burst. More surprising was her lack of interest in her children, Troilo, Ippolito and Federico according to the label; she showed no signs at all that she was devoted to them, she wasn't looking at them or touching them, not even holding the hand of the child to her left, which was very close to her own inert left hand. The Countess was like an astonished statue surrounded by other smaller but similarly self-absorbed statues, because the odd thing was that the children weren't paying her any attention either, although two of them were distractedly clasping the braided belt of her dress. Each figure was gazing out of the picture in a different direction as if each and every one of them was far more interested in people or elements beyond the frame than in each other in the case of the boys, or in her sons, in the case of the mother, who was the central figure. The oldest child on the right was the least attractive and resembled a foundling or an orphan, partly because of his ugly and excessively severe haircut, and partly because of the sad expression on his face; the youngest didn't seem very happy or very affectionate either, just vulnerable, and about to tug at his mother's belt like someone performing a purely reflex or habitual action; the boy on her left, the prettiest of the children and the one with the most alert eyes, seemed completely oblivious to the rest of the group, as if he were anxious to escape both the others and the enforced patience of his extreme youth.
The only gaze that one could follow or imagine was that of the Countess, given that, to her right, beyond the high door, which kept them still further apart (a whim of that month's reorganization), hung the portrait of her husband, at whom she was directing that distinctly chilly and possibly disappointed look, or perhaps it was a look that was wounded by the mere thought of him. 'They were painted separately,' I thought, 'husband and father on one side, wife and mother with the children on the other, two different portraits, in two distinct, isolated spaces rather than in one space common to them both: a bit like my now living alone in London, while Luisa stays here in Madrid with Guillermo and Marina, except that she's devoted to our children and they to her, at least that's how it has been up until now, it would be terrible if that Custardoy fellow were beginning to distance her from them, it happens with women sometimes, they suddenly have eyes and thoughts only for the new man they're chasing or for the old love they're losing—that's the only thing that can, very occasionally, create a rift and cause them temporarily to relegate their children to second place, just as the Countess perhaps has her gaze fixed on the distant soldier who is out of the picture and perhaps out of time, thus neglecting Troilo, Ippolito and Federico, who are accustomed now to the fact that their mother barely pays them any attention and lives obsessed with thoughts of her absent husband and perhaps sees them as a tie and an impediment and a hindrance, I don't think such a thing would ever happen with Luisa, although she does seem to have made frequent use of the Polish babysitter while I've been here, and there must be or could be a reason for that. And Luisa is clearly not obsessed with thoughts of me, however absent I might be. She, after all, was the one to expel me from her time and from the children's time, although I doubtless gave her some cause to do so.'
'Pedro Maria Rossi, Count of San Secondo. 1533-35,' said the label and then went on to describe him: "Pedro Maria Rossi (1504-1547) was a brilliant soldier who served under Francis I of France, Cosimo I de' Medici and Charles V ('So he was a mercenary in other words,' I thought, 'as I am, too, in my own way'). 'The portrait was painted when he was fighting under the imperial flag, which explains the inclusion of the word "imperio" and the many classical quotations.' The Count's blue-grey gaze was even colder than that of his wife, almost scornful, almost steely
and almost cruel, although it was harder to imagine that he was directing it at her than that she was directing hers at him. ('He could be Sir Cruelty,' I thought.) The long beard and mustache made him seem older (he would only have been about thirty when he posed for the portrait) and made it hard to know at first glance whether he was good-looking or merely elegant and severe, a second glance revealed that he certainly was (all three things, I mean). His noble nose was quite large, larger than mine but not as large as Custardoy's, which was, moreover, slightly hooked. Like St. Catharine and Reresby, he wore a sword, on his left side (which meant that he must be right-handed), but his sword was sheathed and you could only see the hilt and the guard, not the blade. He was wearing a fine costume trimmed with fur, and to his right was a statue of a helmeted youth also carrying a sword, presumably the god Mars. The Count had distinguished hands, with fingers that seemed too slender to be those of a warrior. But pretty much the most striking thing about him was the aggressive codpiece, seamed or stitched or whatever you call it (it must have been made of hard leather, not of reeds or wicker as they appear in most paintings), visibly and obscenely pointing upwards—a permanent reminder of his erection—far less discreet and modest, for example, than those worn by Emperor CharlesV and Philip II in the full-length portraits, both by Titian, in the same museum. 'Perhaps this Count, this soldier, this husband, isn't like me at all,' I thought, 'the one who's leaving or has left, but like the one who is about to arrive or has arrived already and is a violent man who carries a sword, like that bastard Custardoy. Perhaps his wife's gaze then is one of devotion and fear, which is why she seems paralyzed and will-less, for devotion and fear are such powerful dominant feelings, whether felt simultaneously or separately it doesn't matter, that they can momentarily cancel out all other feelings, even love for one's children. I hope Luisa doesn't look at Custardoy like that, I hope she isn't afraid of him, still less devoted. But precisely how she looks at him is something I will never know'
I again looked away from the portrait and glanced over at Custardoy or at the man who might be Custardoy and I saw that he was also looking in my direction; I was convinced that, for a couple of seconds, our eyes met, but so briefly that it was likely that we had, in fact, each merely glanced simultaneously at the painting that more or less matched the picture we each had before us, I that of Pedro Maria Rossi and he that of Camilla Gonzaga with Troilo, Ippolito and Federico, their children; since I first spotted him, he must have spent at least seven minutes there jotting down words and scribbling lines but he'd doubtless been there longer than that too, and that's a long time to look at a single painting. In that couple of seconds, however, I was able to see his face full on for the first time, and it immediately impressed me as being crude, rough and cold, with its broad forehead or receding hairline, its sparse mustache (dark like his sideburns) and its nose which appeared, as is only logical, less hooked than it had in profile (yes, he did suddenly remind me of a long-haired singer I had seen on television, probably the singer with that group Ketama), and two enormous very dark eyes, rather wide-set and almost lashless, and both those factors, the lack of lashes and the wide-apartness, must have made his obscene gaze unbearable or possibly irresistible when turned on the women he seduced or bought and possibly also when turned on the men with whom he might be competing. They were eyes that grabbed, like hands, and one night or one day, they had alighted on the face and body of Luisa and made her his prey. ('And very strange dark eyes, I can't really describe them, but there's something strange, something peculiar about them that I don't like,' according to the description I had coaxed out of a reluctant Cristina). And so, to give those eyes no time to fix on or grab me, I walked away from my portrait of the Count, retreated a few steps and went into the room next door, to the left and on a slightly higher leve
l (a matter of going up three or four steps). From there I could peer in every thirty seconds or so to make sure Custardoy had not escaped without my realizing, and, at the same time, I was much less likely to re-enter his field of vision. In that first lightning glimpse of his face full on he had reminded me of someone else, not the singer, but someone I knew personally, but it was too brief a glimpse for me to be able to remember who, or if my memory was right.
The next room was dominated largely by German art. It contained Dürer's famous self-portrait, as well as his 'Adam' and his 'Eve.' However, my eye was caught at once by a long narrow painting I had been familiar with since childhood, when, as was only normal, it had shocked and filled me with a degree of fear tinged with curiosity, 'The Three Ages and Death' by Hans Baldung Grien, which, like the two portraits, has its counterpart in another painting of the same format and dimensions next to it, 'Harmony, or The Three Graces.' In the former, Death, on the right, is grasping the arm of an old woman or has his arm linked through hers and is tugging at her gently, unhurriedly, and the old woman, in turn, has one arm round the shoulder of a young woman while with her left hand she's plucking at the younger woman's skimpy raiments, as if she, too, were drawing her softly away. Death is carrying an hourglass in his right hand ('An hourglass figure,' I thought) and in his left hand keeps a loose hold on a spear twice broken (it almost resembles a thun-derless flash of lightning) on whose point falls or rests the hand of a sleeping child who is lying at the feet of that group of three, though it may be a long time until he joins them, and he is quite oblivious to their dealings. To his right, an owl; in the background, a solar landscape that looks instead lunar, grim and desolate, with a ruined tower in flames; the inevitable cross hangs in the sky. I had always wondered, ever since I was a child,
if the young woman and the old were the same person at very different ages or if they were two separate women, I mean, if the older woman had always been tugging at herself from youth onwards and into old age, when she finally allows herself to be carried off by Death, for if that were not the case, the subject would be graver and more troubling. However, the two women looked very alike to me: the blue eyes, the nose, the rather thin lips, the somewhat sharp chin, the long wavy hair, the stature, the smallish widely-spaced breasts, the feet, the whole figure, there were even similarities in their facial expressions, or at least they were not entirely opposed. The young woman is frowning, either worried or annoyed, but not alarmed or frightened, as she probably would have been had the person drawing her away been a stranger, or just another person, or even her mother. She doesn't struggle or put up a fight or try to shrug off the hand on her shoulder, and at most, she tries to prevent her from removing all her garments. The old woman, for her part, focuses all her attention on the young woman and not on Death, and in her look there is a mixture of gravity, understanding, resolve and pity, but no ill will, as if she were saying to the young woman (or to herself when she was her age): 'I'm sorry, but there's nothing we can do' (or 'Come along, we have to go on; I know because I've already arrived'). As for Death, who has his arm linked through hers, she takes no notice of him, but neither does she resist or oppose him, she looks more towards the past than her future, perhaps because—despite the promises of the cross hanging in the air and the infernal tower in flames, with a large hole in the side as if made by a cannon ball—she knows that there is little or no future left.
'There's Sir Death,' I thought,' as in the English and, generally speaking, the Germanic tradition: he's clearly male, el Muerte not la Muerte, because although he is cadaverous, a semi-skeleton with the skin clinging to bones it barely covers—-like a disguise he's adopted to tread the earth, all the more so when you notice his eyes are more deeply sunken than the rest—you can see a few wisps of beard growing out of his chin, and other wisps, resembling tiny tentacles, more like the tentacles of a cuttlefish or a squid than an octopus, peeping out where his penis and his vanished testicles would have been, now there's only a hole where once a codpiece doubtless stood erect. He's certainly not like Sergeant Death in the Armagh ballad ("And when Sergeant Death's cold arms shall embrace me"), who is a man in his prime, a strong energetic warrior prepared to snatch lives away nonstop, an experienced professional with his cold disciplined arms always busy; this Death is the feeblest and most worn of the three figures, or of the four, with his meek broken spear, so meek that an unwary child can almost touch it. And yet there is determination and energy in the scrawny arm that grips, and he is, above all, the master of time, he holds the clock and knows the time and can see when it's running out, the sand or water, whichever it is that his hourglass contains and on which his red-veined eyes are firmly fixed, rather than on the old or the young woman, for time is his only guide, the only thing that counts for this Sir Death, as naked and decrepit as our Latin hag with her scythe, this Sir Death with neither helmet nor sword.' And I suddenly remembered 'the loud tick-tock' in that small sepulchral living room in the Lisbon cemetery of Os Prazeres, which, according to the traveler who 'with a degree of indiscretion' discovered and observed it, 'was to a normal tick-tock what a shout is to the spoken voice'; and I recalled the enigmatic words suggested by the sight of the alarm clock making the noise ('of the kind we used to see in our parents' kitchens, round in shape, with a bell like a spherical skullcap and with two small balls for feet'): 'It seems to me that time is the only dimension in which the living and the dead can talk to each other and communicate, the only dimension they have in common.' Perhaps when all the sand or all the water had trickled through, thus signaling the death of the old woman painted by Baldung Grien, and who was perhaps also the young woman, when he had finally sent them to join 'the more influential and more animated majority,' he would still have to turn over the hourglass or clepsydra in order to begin the countdown again, about which my compatriot the traveler wondered: Was it the amount of time they had been dead or the time yet to elapse before the final judgment? If it was measuring out the hours of solitude, was it counting those that had passed or those still to come?
I kept peering in at the larger Italian gallery, then turning back to spend a little more time with the German painting, which while it no longer frightened me, still intrigued me. From the threshold I saw, too, 'The Annunciation' by Fra Angelico, an excellent full-size copy of which had presided over my father's living room for as long as I could remember, he and my mother had commissioned it from a friend who was a copyist, a Custardoy of the 1930s and '40s, Daniel Canellada was his name I recall; seeing that painting was, for me, like being at home. On one of my brief forays into the German gallery, I lingered too long in front of the Baldung Grien and, when I returned to the Italian gallery, the man was no longer standing before the Parmigianino, I mean, before the Countess and her children. I bounded down the intervening steps, looking anxiously to right and left, but, fortunately, I spotted him at once, his now closed sketchbook under his arm, on his way to the stairs that led up to the first floor and then to the exit. That's when I started to follow him, or where I became more like his shadow, not in quite the same way as I had been with Tupra on the journeys we made together, but in both cases I relegated myself to the background. Once upstairs, he went to the coat check, and I waited with my back turned until he reappeared, looking round every three seconds so as not to lose him again, and when he emerged, I discovered with horror that what he had left there and retrieved was a hat, possibly a fedora ('A man wearing a ponytail and a hat,' I thought, 'possibly a fedora. Good lord!'). He had the good manners not to put it on while he was indoors, but only when he went out into the street, and then I saw—although it brought me little relief-—that it was broader brimmed than the aforementioned fedora, more the kind of hat a painter or a conductor or an artist would wear, and black, of course. Duly behatted, he set off down the steps outside the museum, opposite the Hotel Ritz, and I followed after, always at a safe distance. He strode along the Paseo del Prado at a good pace, then stopped outside a brasserie, studied the menu, pee
red in through the window, shielding his eyes with his hand against the reflections on the glass (wasn't the brim of his presumptuous hat enough?), as if he were considering having lunch there—although it was early for Madrid unless you happened to be a foreigner; perhaps I was wrong, and he was a foreigner; but he didn't look like one to me, I could sense something unequivocally Spanish about his whole appearance, especially the way he walked, or perhaps it was the trousers—and so I took advantage of that pause to look in the window of a nearby shop selling artifacts from Toledo, including swords—obviously aimed at tourists, but nowadays they wouldn't be allowed to take such swords with them on a plane, they'd have to check them, and even then a sword wouldn't easily fit in a suitcase; it wouldn't be permitted on trains either, and I wondered who the devil would buy such swords now if they couldn't be transported anywhere, a collector of decorative knives and swords like Dick Dearlove would presumably have them sent to him some way or other. Most would be made of our famous Toledo steel, very Spanish and very medieval, but I noticed that among those on display there were also a few that were apparently Scottish and even bore the name 'McLeod' engraved on the guard, an ignoble concession to the movie-mad Anglo-Saxon masses. It occurred to me that I might buy one, not right then, of course, but later, for I had learned from Tupra a little of the effect that such an archaic weapon could produce. Almost all of them, however, were much longer and larger, doubtless far more difficult and far heavier to wield than the 'catgutter' or Landsknecht or Katzbalger, they had really huge blades. They would cut off a hand at a blow. They would slice through and dismember. 'No,' I thought, 'it would be best if it were a sword I didn't have to get rid of, one that I could return to its place, used or not, it wouldn't matter, one that I wouldn't have to throw away or deliberately abandon for someone else to find later.'