The Sun Over Breda

muffled in my cape and with my hand on the hilt of my sword should her uncle’s hired assassins be waiting for me. I still had her delicious fragrance on my fingertips, on my mouth and skin. I also had on my body the now-healed remembrance of her dagger, and in my thoughts her words of love and loathing, one as sincere as the other was deadly.

“I have brought you,” I said to Velazquez, “a sketch of the Marques de los Balbases’ sword. An old comrade who saw it many times remembers it well.”

I turned my back to Angelica’s portrait. Then I took out the paper I had folded inside my doublet and handed it to the painter.

“The grip was of bronze and hammered gold. Here, Your Mercy, you will see how the guards were fashioned.”

Velazquez, who had put down his cloth and brushes, contemplated the sketch with a satisfied air.

“As for the plumes on his hat,” I added, “they were undoubtedly white.”

“Excellent,” he said.

He put the paper on the table and looked at the painting, an expansive depiction of the surrender at Breda. It was destined to decorate the Hall of Realms and was enormous; here in the studio it hung on a special frame attached to the wall, with a ladder set before it so that Velazquez could work on the upper portion.

“I finally listened to you,” he added pensively. “Lances instead of standards.”

It was I who had provided him with these details during long conversations we’d had in recent months, after don Francisco de Quevedo had suggested that my cooperation would be helpful in documenting the particulars of the scene. To accomplish his painting Diego Velazquez decided to dispense with the fury of combatants, the clash of steel—all the obligatory subject matter of traditional battle scenes—and instead sought serenity and grandeur. He wanted, as he told me more than once, to achieve a tone that was at once magnanimous and arrogant and also interpreted in the manner he painted: reality not like it was but as he depicted it, expressing things that conformed with truth but were not explicit, so that all the rest, the context and the spirit suggested by the scene, would be the work of the person who viewed it.

“What do you think of it?” he asked softly.

I knew perfectly well that he did not give a fig about my artistic judgment, especially coming, as it did, from a twenty-four-year-old soldier. He was asking for something different; I knew that from the way he was looking at me, not quite trusting and slightly calculating, as my eyes ran over the painting.

“It was like this and not like this,” I said.

I regretted my words the minute they left my lips, for I was afraid I had offended him. But he limited himself to a faint smile.

“Good,” he said. “I am aware that there is no hill of this height near Breda and that the perspective of the background is a little forced.” He took a few steps and stood looking at the painting with his fists on his hips. “But the scene works, and that is what matters.”

“I was not referring to those things.”

“I know what you were referring to.”

He went to the hand with which the Dutch Justin of Nassau was offering the key to our General Spinola—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 Marques de Espinar, the Marques de Leganes, and Spinola himself, none of the other heads in the main scene corresponded to those of royal personages. I was equally indifferent to the fact that Velazquez 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 Spinola—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 Balanzon.

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 Chacon, whom I had watched die as he tried to save that same