The Sun Over Breda

He went to the hand with which the Dutch Justin of Nassau was offering the key to our General Spínola—as yet the key was no more than a sketch and a blob of color—and rubbed it a little with his thumb. Then he stepped back, never taking his eyes from the painting; he was focused on the space between their two heads, the area beneath the horizontal butt of the harquebus the soldier who had neither beard nor mustache was carrying over his shoulder, there where the aquiline profile of Captain Alatriste was hinted at, half hidden behind the officers.

“In the end,” he said finally, “it will always be remembered as it is here. When you and I and all the rest of them are dead.”

I was studying the faces of the colonels and captains in the foreground, some still lacking the artist’s finishing touches. Of least importance to me was that, except for Justin of Nassau, the prince of Newburg, don Carlos Coloma, the Marqués de Espinar, the Marqués de Leganés, and Spínola himself, none of the other heads in the main scene corresponded to those of royal personages. I was equally indifferent to the fact that Velázquez had given the features of his fellow artist and friend Alonso Cano to the Dutch harquebusier on the left and that on the right he had utilized features very close to his own for the officer in high boots who was looking out toward the viewer. Nor did I care that the chivalrous gesture of poor don Ambrosio Spínola—who had died in physical pain and shame four years earlier, in Italy—was exactly the same as it had been that morning, while the artist’s rendering of the Dutch general attributed to him more humility and submission than Nassau had shown when he surrendered the city at Balanzón.

What I had

been referring to was that in that serene composition—in that “Please do not bow, don Justin, no,” and in the restrained attitude of various officers—something was hidden that I, farther back among the lances but close enough to see clearly, had observed that day: the insolent pride of the conquerors and the ill will and hatred in the eyes of the conquered. The brutality with which we had killed one another and would still do so in the future assured that the graves that filled the landscape of the background amid the misty smoke from burning fires would never be enough to hold the dead.

As for who was in the foreground of the painting and who was not, one thing was certain: We, the loyal and long-suffering infantry, were not. We, the old tercios

that had done the dirty work in the mines and caponnieres, carried out encamisada raids in the night, breached the Sevenberge dike with fire and axes, fought at the Ruyter mill and the Terheyden fort, we foot soldiers with our rags and our worn-out weapons, our pustules, our illnesses, and our misery, we were nothing but cannon fodder. Yes, we were the eternal background against which the other Spain, the official Spain of laces and sweeping bows, took possession of the key to the city of Breda—which, as we had feared, we were not allowed to sack—and posed for posterity, indulging themselves in the sham, the luxury, of showing a magnanimous spirit. We are among caballeros, and in Flanders the sun has not yet set.

“It will be a great painting,” I said.

I was sincere. It would be a great painting, and the world would perhaps remember our unfortunate Spain, made resplendent in that canvas on which it was not difficult to sense the breath of immortality issuing from the palette of the greatest painter time had known. The reality, however, my true memories, were to be found in the middle distance of the scene. Inadvertently, my glance kept straying there, beyond the central composition, which did not matter a nun’s fart to me, to the old blue-and-white-checked standard on the shoulder of a bearer with thick hair and mustache, who well could be Lieutenant Chacón, whom I had watched die as he tried to save that same piece of cloth on the slope of the Terheyden redoubt. My eyes went to the harquebusiers—Rivas, Llop, and others who did not return to Spain, or anywhere else for that matter—backs turned to the principal scene, lost in the forest of disciplined lances; the lancers themselves, all anonymous in the painting, were men to whom I could, one by one, give the names of the living and dead comrades who had carried those lances across Europe, holding them high with their sweat and their blood, to demonstrate the truth of what had been written: