Altea raised his eyes and his voice to round off his performance with a “Viva Franco!” and “Arriba España!” chorused enthusiastically by the audience and generating a forest of arms raised in salute and not a few tearful eyes. Altea himself joined in the thunderous applause inundating the garden. Before leaving the stage, the minister made a sign to the bandleader, who, ensuring the ovation did not die down into murmurings, took it into a waltz that promised to maintain the elation in the air for the rest of the evening. Yet by the time it became clear that the Generalissimo was not coming, many of the guests dropped their masks on the floor and began to make their way to the exit.

4

Valls heard the distant ripples of the applause that had closed Altea’s speech as it merged into the orchestra’s next number. Altea, “his great friend and esteemed colleague,” who for years had been trying to stab him in the back: that message from the Generalissimo excusing his absence must have been music to his ears. Valls cursed Altea and his bunch of hyenas, that pack of new centurions already called “the poisoned flowers” by more than one: they had sprouted in the regime’s shadows and were beginning to fill key positions in the administration. Most of them were prowling about the garden right now, drinking his champagne and nibbling his canapés. Sniffing his blood. Valls put the cigarette he was holding to his lips, but there was just a hint of ash left on it. Vicente, his chief personal bodyguard, was observing him from the other end of the corridor and walked over to offer him one of his own.

“Thanks, Vicente.”

“Congratulations, Don Mauricio,” his loyal guard dog intoned.

Valls nodded, smiling bitterly to himself. Vicente, ever faithful and respectful, returned to his place at the end of the passage, where, if one didn’t look carefully, he seemed to melt into the wallpaper.

Valls took a first drag and observed the wide corridor that opened before him through the curtain of his cigarette smoke. Mercedes called it “the portrait gallery.” The corridor circled the entire third floor and was filled with paintings and sculptures that lent it an air of a grand museum bereft of viewers. Lerma, the curator of the Prado Museum, who took care of Valls’s collection, was always reminding him that he shouldn’t smoke there and that sunlight could damage the paintings. Valls took a second drag on his cigarette to Lerma’s health. He realized that what Lerma was trying to say, though he didn’t have the nerve, was that those pieces deserved better than to be confined in a private home, however splendid the setting, or however powerful its owner; their natural place was a museum where they could be admired and enjoyed by the public, those insignificant souls who clapped in ceremonies and queued up in funerals.

Valls sometimes enjoyed sitting on one of the plush armchairs dotted around the portrait gallery to admire his treasures. Many of the works had been lent to him, or simply seized from the private collections of citizens who had ended up on the wrong side of the conflict. Others came from museums and palaces under his ministry’s jurisdiction, by way of a permanent loan. He liked to recall those summer afternoons when little Mercedes—who wasn’t even ten at the time—sat on his knees and listened to the stories hidden behind each one of those marvels. Valls took refuge in those memories, in his daughter’s look of fascination when she heard him talk about Sorolla and Zurbarán, about Goya and Velázquez.