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:
Always on the brink of warthey fought, forever grand,in Germany and Flanders, too,in France and upon English land.The very earth bowed down to themtrembling as they passed,and ordinary soldiers, massedin unparalleled campaign,across the world, from East to West,carried the sun of Spain.
It was they, Spaniards with several tongues and lands among them but all united in ambition, pride, and suffering, and not the pretentious figures portrayed in the foreground of the canvas, who were the ones to whom the Dutchman was delivering his precious key. To those nameless, faceless troops barely visible on the slope of a hill that never existed, where, at ten o’clock on the morning of 5 June in the twenty-fifth year of the century, regnant in Spain our king don Philip IV, I, along with Captain Alatriste, Sebastian Copons, Curro Garrote, and the remaining survivors of their decimated squad, witnessed the surrender of Breda. And nine years later, in Madrid, standing before Diego Velazquez’s panorama, it seemed that I could again hear the drum and that I was watching, amid the forts and smoking trenches in the distance, near Breda, the slow advance of the old, implacable squads, the pikes and standards of what was the last and best infantry in the world: despised, cruel, arrogant Spaniards disciplined only when under fire, who suffered everything in any assault but would allow no man to raise his voice to them.
EDITOR’S NOTE CONCERNING THE
PRESENCE OF CAPTAIN ALATRISTE IN
DIEGO VELAZQUEZ’S PAINTING
THE SURRENDER OF BREDA
The alleged presence of Captain Diego Alatriste y Tenorio in the painting The Surrender of Breda has been debated for many years. On the one hand, we have the testimony of Inigo Balboa, who was witness to the composition of the painting and who has unhesitatingly stated on two occasions that the captain is represented in Velazquez’s canvas. On the other hand, studies of the heads on the right side have resulted in the positive identification of Spinola and established as probable those of Carlos Coloma, the Marques de Leganes, the Marques de Espinar, and the prince of Newburg, these according to analyses by Professors Justi, Allende Salazar, Sanchez Canton, and Temboury Alvarez, but they reject the idea that any of the anonymous heads corresponds to the physical features Inigo Balboa attributes to the captain.
The bearer holding the standard on his shoulder cannot be Diego Alatriste, nor can the musketeer in the rear, who has no beard or mustache. Similarly eliminated are the pale, bareheaded caballero standing beneath the standard and beside the horse, and the corpulent, dark-skinned, hatless officer standing beneath the horizontal butt of the harquebus, whom Professor Sergio Zamorano from the University of Seville believes to be Captain Carmelo Bragado. Some scholars have argued the possibility that Alatriste was portrayed in the officer on the extreme right, behind the horse, looking toward the viewer, a person other experts, such as Temboury, judge to be Velazquez himself, who thus balanced the supposed inclusion of his friend Alonso Cano at the extreme left as the Dutch harquebusier.
Professor Zamorano similarly points out in his study of the painting, Breda: Realidad y leyenda, that Diego Alatriste’s physical attributes might correspond to those of the officer situated at the right of the canvas, although that man’s features, he suggests, are softer than those described by Inigo Balboa when he speaks of Captain Alatriste. In any case, as the translator and scholar Miguel Anton of Barcelona writes in his essay “El Capitan Alatriste y la rendicion de Breda,” the age of that caballero, no more than thirty or so, does not coincide with the age of Alatriste in 1625, much less with his fifty-one or fifty-two years in 1634–1635, the date the painting was completed. Neither does the clothing of the officer correspond with what Alatriste, then a simple soldier with the nominal rank of squad corporal, would be wearing in Flanders. There is still the possibility that Alatriste was not represented in the group on the right but among the Spaniards down the slope, in the center of the painting, behind the extended arm of General Spinola. However, a very careful examination of their features and clothing published in Figaro magazine by the specialist Etienne de Montety seems to negate that theory.
And yet, Inigo Balboa’s affirmation on 'Chapter 1: Surprise Attack' of the first volume in this series sounds unequivocal: “…because later, on the bulwarks of Julich…my father was killed by a ball from a harquebus—which was why Diego Velazquez did not include him in his painting Surrender of Breda, as he did his friend and fellow Diego, Alatriste, who is indeed there, behind the horse.” These disconcerting words were for a long time considered by most experts to be less fact than gratuitous affirmation—Balboa’s exaggerated homage to his beloved Captain Alatriste—with no basis in truth. Balboa was a soldier in Flanders and Italy, a standard bearer and lieutenant at Rocroi, lieutenant of the royal mails, and captain of the Guardia Espanola of King Philip IV before retiring for personal reasons around 1660, at the age of fifty. That was after his marriage to dona Ines Alvarez of Toledo, the widowed Marquesa de Alguazas, and his later disappearance from public life. His memoirs came to light only in 1951, in an auction of books and manuscripts in the Claymore house in London. Arturo Perez-Reverte used the memoirs as his documented source for The Adventures of Captain Alatriste, and he confesses that for a long time he believed that Inigo’s assertion that Diego Alatriste did in fact appear in Velazquez’s painting was false.
But chance has finally resolved the mystery, disclosing data that had been overlooked by scholars and by the author of this series of novels based almost entirely on Balboa’s original manuscript.1 In August 1998, when I visited Perez-Reverte in his home near El Escorial to clear up some editorial matters, he confided to me a discovery he had made accidentally as he was documenting the epilogue of the third volume of the series. Only the day before, while consulting Jose Camon Aznar’s Velazquez—one of the more definitive works on the author of The Surrender of Breda—Perez-Reverte had come upon something that had left him stupefied. On pages 508 and 509 of the first volume (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1964), Professor Camon Aznar confirmed that an X-radiographic study of the canvas had validated some of Inigo Balboa’s affirmations concerning the Velazquez painting that had at first seemed to be contradictory, such as the fact, proved on the X- ray plate, that the artist had originally painted standards instead of lances, not unusual in a painter famous for his pentimentos—modifications made along the way that led him to change outlines, alter compositions, and eliminate objects and persons already painted. In addition to the standards’ being replaced by lances, the horse on the Spaniards’ side was suggested in three different attitudes; in the background, in the correct geographical orientation, toward the Sevenberge dike and the sea, there appears to be an expanse of water and a ship; Spinola was sketched in a more erect position; and, on the Spanish side, it is possible to make out the heads and embroidered collars of additional personages. For reasons we cannot divine, in the definitive version Velazquez overpainted the head of a man who appears to be a noble, and also possibly another. And there is something more: In regard to Diego Alatriste’s presence, which Inigo Balboa describes as he views the canvas and specifies his exact location—the area beneath the horizontal butt of the harquebus that the soldier without a beard or mustache was carrying over his shoulder—the viewer sees only empty space above the blue doublet of a pikeman whose back is turned.
The true surprise, however—proof that painting, like literature, is but a succession of enigmas and closed envelopes that enclose other closed envelopes—is buried in half a line on page 509 of Camon Aznar’s book and refers to that same very suspicious and empty space where the X-ray revealed that “behind that head one can make out another with an aquiline profile….”
Reality often amuses itself by confirming on its own what seems to us to be fiction. We do not know why Velazquez later decided to eliminate from his masterpiece a head he had already painted. Perhaps later books in
