The Sun Over Breda by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
“I have brought you,” I said to Velázquez, “a sketch of the Marqués de los Balbases’ sword. An old comrade who saw it many times remembers it well.”
I turned my back to Angélica’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.”
Velázquez, 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 Velázquez 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 Velázquez 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 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:
Always on the brink of war
they fought, forever grand,
in Germany and Flanders, too,
in France and upon English land.
The very earth bowed down to them
trembling as they passed,
and ordinary soldiers, massed
in 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 Velázquez’s panorama, it seemed that I could again hear the drum and that I was watching, amid the f
EDITOR’S NOTE CONCERNING THE
PRESENCE OF CAPTAIN ALATRISTE IN
DIEGO VELÁZQUEZ’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 Íñigo Balboa, who was witness to the composition of the painting and who has unhesitatingly stated on two occasions that the captain is represented in Velázquez’s canvas. On the other hand, studies of the heads on the right side have resulted in the positive identification of Spínola and established as probable those of Carlos Coloma, the Marqués de Leganés, the Marqués de Espinar, and the prince of Newburg, these according to analyses by Professors Justi, Allende Salazar, Sánchez Cantón, and Temboury Álvarez, but they reject the idea that any of the anonymous heads corresponds to the physical features Íñigo 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 Velázquez 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 Íñigo Balboa when he speaks of Captain Alatriste. In any case, as the translator and scholar Miguel Antón of Barcelona writes in his essay “El Capitán Alatriste y la rendición de Bredá,” 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 Spínola. However, a very careful examination of their features and clothing published in Figaro magazine by the specialist Étienne de Montety seems to negate that theory.
And yet, Íñigo 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 Velázquez 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 Española of King Philip IV before retiring for personal reasons around 1660, at the age of fifty. That was after his marriage to doña Inés Álvarez 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 Pérez-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 Íñigo’s assertion that Diego Alatriste did in fact appear in Velázquez’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 Pérez-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 José Camón Aznar’s Velázquez—one of the more definitive works on the author of The Surrender of Breda—Pérez-Reverte had come upon something that had left him stupefied. On pages 508 and 509 of the first volume (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1964), Professor Camón Aznar confirmed that an X-radiographic study of the canvas had validated some of Íñigo Balboa’s affirmations concerning the Velázquez 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; Spínola 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 Velázquez 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 Íñigo 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 Camón 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 Velázquez later decided to eliminate from his masterpiece a head he had already painted. Perhaps later books in this series will clarify that mystery.2 But now, almost four centuries after all that happened, we know that Íñigo Balboa did not lie and that Captain Alatriste was—and still is—on the canvas of The Surrender of Breda.
—The Editor
A SELECTION FROM
A POETRY BOUQUET
BY VARIOUS LIVELY MINDS
OF THIS CITY
Printed in the XVIIth century, lacking the printer’s mark, and conserved in the Condado de Guadalmedina section of the Nuevo Extremo Ducal Archive and Library, Seville
DON FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO
Inscription to the Marqués Ambrosio Spínola,
Commander of Catholic Forces in Flanders
Sinon, Ulysses, and the Trojan Horse
Won the day in Troy with treachery,
Whereas in Ostend, leading your troops,
It was your sword that crushed the enemy.
As your squads approached their walls
Frisia and Breda foresaw their destiny;
Facing your might, the heretic gave way His
banners struck, his pennon a mockery.
You subjected t
To benefit the Spanish monarchy,
Your ideals countering their heresy.
In Flanders, we badly missed your gallantry,
E’en more in Italy…and now this eulogy
Amid sorrow we dare not contemplate.