Sergio Pitol - The Art of Flight

It is not surprising that because of his connection to theater people and their coterie Gabriel Araceli might at times escape the role assigned to him by Galdós: that of the exemplar of virtues of a ruling class that, out of nowhere, was destined to occupy the space that the nobility had begun to lose. From his youth, Gabriel, whom military honors would soon transform into a member of the new redemptive class, was to represent the ideals of the new society that was taking shape and be the champion of unimpeachable morals. That burden, similar to that which weighed on the “positive hero” of the ideological literature of the twentieth century, tends to diminish in some episodes his verisimilitude as the protagonist, and strips him of the essential inner life necessary to become an entirely convincing character. But the boundless energy of the social fabric that surrounds him saves him from becoming a mechanical doll. Galdós endows him with keen powers of observation, a facility for establishing relationships between characters and situations, the qualities necessary for the proper development of a novel, apt for enriching its dramatic moments, ennobling the heroic ones, and heightening the joyous ones. All this at the cost of suppressing in large part his life of instinct.

In The Court of Carlos IV , Gabriel experiences moments of joyful rebellion against the demiurge. It must not be forgotten that he is in the prime of his life, moves in a social circle free of rigor, and carries himself with great ease in settings where aristocrats, actors, and even less reputable characters are accustomed to exchanging partners. If in the first chapters we find Gabriel chastely in love with a sweet neighbor, a young seamstress, we can also imagine him as the possible future lover of a great lady of the Court, a beautiful countess of exceptional powers at Palace with whom he dreams of repeating that infamous story whose protagonists are the Queen María Luisa de Parma and Manuel Godoy, her minister, whom she plucked out of a barracks and transformed into the most powerful man in the kingdom. Gabriel has become so independent of the fate imposed on him by his creator that, now blinded by the beauty of the supreme Amaranta whose “ideal and stately beauty roused a strange emotion akin to sadness,” 13as her adolescent lover describes her with happy intuition, he embarks on an adventure that overtakes, disillusions, and humiliates him, but that provides him a unique view of the world from above, of its unprecedented powers and also — alas! — its secret vulnerability.

If Trafalgar constitutes an initiation test under the sign of the Epos, The Court of Carlos IV will place before our hero another, more difficult, kind of test. Gabriel has penetrated the world of fiction with weapons and heroic deeds; he has yet to discover other scenarios where battles are fought in secret and surreptitiously, battles that possess another dimension and are fraught with traps and unknown risks. Araceli enters a minefield, the same one that members of the royal family and their closest retinue tread.

Gabriel will walk away from this Episode more cautious than from other apparently more dangerous ones, like the heroic military sieges and memorable battles. Here, the plot flows through two parallel channels: a public one — the conspiracy of the Prince of Asturias, the future Fernando VII, to murder his mother and dethrone his father; and a private one — a relationship of love and jealousy, whose threads have been cleverly woven to lead to a crime of passion. The two plots continuously intertwine and support each other. The public one is an affair of State; the private one, which gives the story its true body, functions through a mechanism widely used in Renaissance drama; we find it in several of Shakespeare’s comedies, many of Lope’s and Calderon’s, and almost obsessively in Tirso: Pepilla Isidoro loves González Máiquez, who doesn’t even notice her. Máiquez loves the Duchess Lesbia, the Queen’s lady in waiting and secret agent of the Prince of Asturias, who despises him. Lesbia loves Don Juan de Mañara, a handsome officer of the King’s guard and also agent of the Prince of Asturias, who is deceiving her with a wench from the slums of Madrid. Everyone is jealous of everyone. Two of the characters from the romantic entanglement are already embroiled in the Palace plot. The Countess Amaranta, who neither loves nor is loved by anyone, participates in a scheme to punish Lesbia’s disloyalty. The fake knife with which Máiquez, in the role of Othello, will punish the wantonness of Desdemona, played by Lesbia, will be replaced at the last moment by a real one that will be plunged into the heroine’s chest. At that moment, Gabriel will act with great courage and race to prevent the crime.

The tone of the Episode is unmistakably Goyaesque. It could not be otherwise. The very title recalls Goya’s most celebrated painting, The Family of Carlos IV . Goya was the official court painter of the Crown. In that role, he painted a series of portraits of Carlos IV and the Queen María Luisa, of Fernando as Prince of Asturias and as King of Spain, of the rest of the infantes , the royal children, the large canvas on which the entire family appears, as well as a remarkable portrait of Godoy. The actor Isidoro Máiquez was also painted by Goya; his portrait hangs today in the Museo del Prado, near the King and Queen and the infantes. Amaranta, in a fit of capriciousness and defiance, had Goya paint her nude, which leads us immediately to associate her with The Nude Maja . The curtains for the performance of Othello, we are told, were also painted by Goya. The Aragonese painter is present everywhere and at all times.

A powerful and perhaps more troubling referent than the plot itself is represented by the distant, and for the majority of Spaniards, blurry, figure of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose army enters Spain the day a dinner is held at the home of Pepilla González, where comedians and courtiers meet to work out the final details of the performance of Othello. No one in the course of the Episode knows for sure what Napoleon proposes upon entering Spain, and each person attempts to reconcile that enigma in the way that best suits their interests.

“Someone who performs or plays a role in theaters is commonly known as a comediante, ” states the first edition of the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy. The comediante appears to be someone other than who he in fact is; his function is to portray someone else. One day he pretends to be the king, and the next day he is a laborer, saint, or ship’s captain. That ability to pretend, that ability to create ecstasy out of nothing — shipwrecks, love affairs, dethronements — tends sometimes to filter in a perverse way into the comediante’s personal life. Isidoro Máiquez, for example, during the rehearsals for Othello, becomes delirious; jealousy has overtaken him, fueled, among other reasons, by malicious anonymous letters informing him that he has been nothing but a whim to “his Duchess,” a common plaything of a refined lady who, incidentally, has replaced him with Don Juan de Mañara, a gentleman in his own right. In the drama’s final scene, Máiquez’s personality has vanished; he has been entirely transformed into a crazed Moor, a murderer. The version represented differs in some aspects from the original drama. The proof of Desdemona’s infidelity is found in an impassioned letter that she has supposedly written to her lover. An anonymous hand has forged her handwriting and signature. Faced with this evidence, Othello can no longer doubt her guilt. The letter seals the couple’s fate. Desdemona must inevitably die at the hands of the Moor. A letter in which Lesbia attempts to assuage Mañara’s jealousy has fallen into the hands of someone intent on punishing her. She reprimands him for daring to imagine that a woman of her stature might be interested in a ridiculous little comedian. Someone has removed the paper that Othello must read before the prostrate body of Desdemona, replacing it with the letter in which Lesbia ridicules him to reassure Juan de Mañara, and that same someone has replaced the stage dagger with a real knife. The Marquesa’s die is cast: she will die that night before her lover’s eyes, before those of her ferocious husband, and those of the very distinguished audience made up of the kingdom’s great nobility. Only Araceli’s timely intervention manages to avert the disaster.