A sense of imperative symmetry, as those people passed by, obliged you to evoke the first time you saw Madrid. It was in the years before the European war and in a time as distant now as the Rome of Scipio Aemilianus. Your parents took you and your brother and sisters in a delayed fulfillment of an almost forgotten promise. As if you were figures in a daguerreotype, you all appeared in Retiro Park on another morning in an uncertain, early summer. The girls almost shivering in their white dresses with big yellow ribbons in their hair. Your brother and you in knit ties with large knots and one-button jackets fastened almost in the middle of your chests. They showed you the statue of The Fallen Angel, the only monument to the devil in the world, as your father said emphatically, when Machaquito and Vicente Pastor passed by in an open hackney carriage. You recognized them right away because you had seen them a few times in the bullring in Granada and many more times in the illustrations in La Esfera and Mundo Gráfico. Machaco had the dull air of a Cordoban impresario or a bookkeeper who had suddenly become wealthy. Beside him, like a giant, his body, arms, and face long, his broad smile, and protuberant bluish jaw, the very Madrilenian Vicente Pastor, the Kid in the Smock. There was no trace or memory left of the work-man’s smock he had worn to his first amateur bullfight. Still, upon seeing him dressed in his Panama hat and high buttoned boots, his tight vest, trousers, and short jacket, a white silk handkerchief around his neck, a watch chain with three loops across his chest, and a full-blown carnation in his lapel, you were overcome by the certainty that even in your earliest childhood you knew, clearly and powerfully. One day, you told yourself, after many years you would remember the carriage driving the bullfighter through the park. Until then your memory of him in the Madrilenian morning, including The Fallen Angel, would lie dormant, preparing for the appointed hour. When that came, it would be returned to you, as the stereotype plate is revealed in the developing tray, to give meaning and fulfillment to a time as irrevocable and irreversible as the water in rivers.
And now Vicente Pastor was returning. The relic of your memory of him suddenly glimmered and identified with the good-looking men in traditional dress, with their starched handkerchiefs, tight trousers, and caps pulled down on one side. One was also the Kid in the Smock with the peasant women in their Gypsy skirts, baskets still warm and redolent of speckled hens on their arms. Everything shuffled together and confused to give you the image of the other Madrid, the one of sea and river crabs hawked in the streets along with cheeses from Miraflores and cakes from Astorga, just as you saw it that morning in your childhood and were witnessing it again now, complete and alive, almost as a loan. The death throes of the Madrid of bull-fighters in open carriages and flashy men and women at open-air festivals were coinciding with yours. That entire world, heir to Goya’s cartoons for tapestries through various avatars, would end forever as soon as the streets and fields filled with dead bodies, as you had just predicted to Rafael Martínez Nadal.
In the Retiro they were exhibiting old French impressionists. All of you stopped in front of Monet’s La Gare Saint Lazare. Your father shook his head, a scornful smile spread to his jaws, and he asked what the devil that blur was. He understood perfectly well that after centuries painters cannot paint as Murillo did in his time. He also had known Moreno Carbonero, the great artist of Málaga, and he understood and appreciated art. This was why, this was precisely why, he grew increasingly sure of himself, he denounced these frauds by impostors who did not know what to do to attract attention. Your brother and you answered immediately, expressing much more admiration for the painting than the two of you felt. Even though he was normally ill-tempered and did not tolerate arguments, he took almost no notice of your dissent. He merely shrugged his shoulders, which the years had not bent, taking into account your innocence as well as your ignorance. The girls were silent, and as if she were talking only to them, in a quiet, unhurried voice, your mother began to tell them that Monet did not intend to represent the world of surfaces, contours, and volumes (she was on the point of adding, “the world that, after all, we don’t see but imagine so we can understand one another,” but didn’t dare to in order not to enrage your father, who so far was listening to her with the same studied indifference he used when listening to you), but the other world, the one that light and shadows transform constantly. “His intention, like Velázquez’s in the Meninas we saw yesterday in the Prado, was to capture a fleeting instant: one of the unnoticed, evolving moments that come, pass, fade, and together constitute our brief lives. To create this painting, constantly fluid and in transition, Monet used very short, thick brushstrokes that stand out perfectly in the picture, the kind we pointed out to you in Las Meninas. Needless to say,” your mother concluded, “the similarity is not accidental, if we keep in mind that both Velázquez and Monet were trying to represent a pause in time. Velázquez, the instant in which the lady-in-waiting offers the princess a vase, and Monet the arrival of the train puffing smoke at the far end of the Saint-Lazare station.”
You listened to her until that point (the point being staged now, with the ghosts of all of you like actors in this theater in hell). Then you stopped hearing her in order to observe your own personal revelation before the painting. As had happened before, when your family crossed paths with Vicente Pastor beside The Fallen Angel, you told yourself you ought to treasure the moment, with La Gare Saint Lazare in the background, because on another occasion in your life its true significance would be revealed to you. Again in the station in Madrid and at the end of the Andalucía express, you knew the moment foreseen twenty-four or twenty-five years earlier had arrived. Like water in water, the memory of the painting by Monet merged into the present reality, in which you weren’t listening to Rafael just as in the Retiro you stopped hearing your mother as she attempted to explain to all of you the secret intentions of impressionism before your father’s sarcastic smile. Smoke with smoke, platforms with platforms, iron horses with iron horses, everything intermingled with everything. So tight was the weave of the living and the painted that you didn’t know with certainty if you were entering a station or a picture. Suddenly, like a note in the margin of that experience, you repeated everything your mother had said in the Retiro. Monet tried to capture a fleeting instant in La Gare Saint Lazare, one of the transitory, marvelous seconds whose passage we are almost never aware of in our lives. He painted an ordinary train entering Paris and performed a miracle achieved previously only by Velázquez. In other words, he stopped time so that men could take delight in the silent miracle, assuming they weren’t blind to his painting as your father was. Now his painted moment and your lived moment were one, when your arrival in and departure from Madrid were confused into a single instant at both ends of a quarter of a century that was also the time of your self-aware life.