My idea, having performed its acrobatic capers, became a fixed idea . . . I cannot think of anything in the world so fixed.
MACHADO DE ASSTS
A
THOUGH the notion of a struggling actor's son that he was actually a mighty prince has its funny side, in truth it was a very serious business with far-reaching consequences both for good and ill. A child's dreams are not idle fancies, they are the means by which he creates the person he is going to become.Indeed, who could fail to see that II Principe Marco Giovanni Lor-enzo Alessandro Ippolito Borghese was not going to be a mere victim of his circumstances?
Most children who are subjected to extreme insecurity or deprivation are blighted for life by the threats to their survival: panic dissolves their inner strength and turns it to venom; they grow humble and sly, spine-less and vicious. Not to blame yet condemned, molded for subservience and betrayal, they conform according to their needs and pounce accord-ing to their opportunities. Such are the dregs of humanity, Shake-speare's swelling mob, the helpless but dangerous rabble, from whose ranks Mark was saved by conferring upon himself the advantages of no-ble birth. He made himself a prince — and what does a true prince know about servitude and compliance, pilfering, backbiting and twisting arms to get ahead? He is already there. He has the privilege of honor, the sword of an independent spirit, a multitude of generous and willful sen-timents, the courage of great armies and the revenues of royal expecta-tions to maintain them. A prince does not mix with the crowd, he has no desire to get involved in sordid wrangles with indifferent or hostile people; he covets nothing that is theirs, he wants only what is his by birthright.
Mark did not disclose his dreams to anyone, but his father could guess 23
a great deal from the boy's fierce silences and his manner of bearing up to the solitude of travel.
"He'll end up doing something crazy with his life," Niven told his wife with deep apprehension.
"Look who's talking!" she retorted, blaming her husband and de-fending her child.
Shy and withdrawn by nature and habit, never staying anywhere long enough to make friends or keep them, Mark lived in his head. Through curiosity about his aristocratic forebears he became interested in history and, later, in romantic novels. History confirmed his conviction that he would have to look after himself, and romantic novels reassured him that it could be done. Historical figures who could also have been the heroes of romantic fiction were especially dear to him; General San Martin became his idol long before he figured out any connection between him- self and the Liberator of Argentina, Chile and Peru. And he was en- thralled by the character his father had nearly played in the film, Du-mas' Count of Monte Cristo, who was betrayed and abominably persecuted, but found a fantastic fortune inside a rock in the sea. Mark didn't actually read Dumas' novel until after the film was canceled and they were banished from their home on the quai d'Orleans, but then it became his favorite book.
In turn, Monte Cristo's luck got him interested in books about buried treasure.
For a long time he couldn't quite decide whether he should be found by aristocratic parents or find a fortune on his own. In one respect this singular boy was not unlike millions: he longed for the good life without either slaving or stealing for it.
He was only fourteen when he set his heart on solving this insoluble problem.
The Nivens were spending the summer in Madrid, as Dana Niven had been hired for a few shoot-outs in a Western to be filmed on the plains of La Mancha, and on one of the actor's free days in August the family boarded a bus to take a look at nearby Toledo. It was during this sight-seeing excursion that Mark decided, in a fit of bitterness, to stake his life on an unlikely enterprise. Despite his youth, it was a fateful deci-sion. Sensible plans are often abandoned but senseless ones hardly ever;
people persist in their most doubtful undertakings with the most obses-sive determination. Obsessions grow from uncertainties.
As for the excursion to Toledo, Mark was pleased with his parents for thinking of it. The seat of ancient kings and Inquisitors General in-spired him with the joy of recognition; he was delighted to find that its atmosphere of menacing splendor so faithfully reflected what he knew about its history, a chronicle of almost unrelieved horror from the time of the Visigoths to the 193os Civil War. The somber buildings with their
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fortified entrances, the dark, twisting passages, the sudden spires, the whole uncannily beautiful city seemed imbued with the spirit of torture and bloodbaths. "No wonder El Greco painted people with long faces,"
remarked Dana Niven. In the cathedral, though, they were surprised by Narciso Tome's exuberant altarpiece which billows up to heaven, split-ting open the distant roof, and is held up by two of the pluckiest little cherubs who ever shouldered fifty-seven tons of stucco and marble.
Mark also received presents, even though his birthday had been cel-ebrated a couple of days earlier. After their visit to the cathedral they stopped by a secondhand bookshop and his father invited him to look and see whether any of the old books might interest him. From the pile on the trestle table outside the shop Mark chose a worn and bulky vol- ume — bulky not because of its length but on account of the large type- face and thick pages, made of the sort of crude and heavy paper used for popular books at the turn of the century. It was a copy of Enrique Menendez's pioneering work on sunken treasure ships, Tesoros al Fondo del Mar, the second edition, printed in 1908. Dana Niven never forgave himself for buying the book: it was the wrong present at the wrong time, and he brooded on the question of whether his son would have ended up the same way without it. But how was he to know, back then in Toledo, that there could be any harm in letting the boy have a dusty old volume which would help him to improve his Spanish?
"The worst of it is," he said bleakly, relating the incident many years later, on a film set in Marseilles, "I never wanted so much to make him happy. We both wanted to give him a special treat that day."
At a souvenir shop in the same street, which was so narrow that Mark, stretching out his arms, could touch the houses on both sides at once, his mother bought him an elaborately carved chess set with figures in medieval attire, and the diary in blue morocco leather with a Toledo sword on its cover. He never used the chess set, but he tried his hand at the diary later that day, expressing his conviction that "people just do not give a damn about each other".
Toledo was the right place for such a reflection, by no means a new one for the young misanthrope, and he could still be lighthearted about the bitter truth when they stopped in the Plaza de Zocodover, the chief place of execution on the Iberian peninsula for over a thousand years.
"Take a really good look," Mark was saying in his usual way of sharing his historical knowledge with his parents, who were always keen to learn. "This square has probably soaked up more human blood than any other spot in Europe. See that arch over there? That's called the Puerta de Sangre. It was right here that King Pedro the Cruel used to burn women at the stake just because they refused to sleep with him.
I'm not kidding. Any woman who wouldn't sleep with him was tied to a stake and burned to ashes." Then he added with the air of someone 25
setting a trap: "I bet you think that's why he was called the Cruel, hey?"
"Why, of course," said his father, who played the straight man in this sort of conversation. "They couldn't have called him Pedro the Cruel for any other reason. Unless he did something even beastlier than that."
Mark grinned triumphantly. "You're wrong! They didn't mind him burning anybody. They called him the Cruel because he wouldn't let them massacre the Jews."
"But how cruel of him!" exclaimed the actor.
"Well, so much for people," Mark concluded cheerfully. So much for the species who didn't care whether the Nivens lived or starved.
They had lunch at the Parador Conde de Orgaz, a recently built rep-lica of a 16th-century coaching inn on the crest of a hill on the other side of the river, where they could sit on the terrace and enjoy a pano-ramic view of the city. Set high on its great rock, ringed by its ancient walls and the River Tagus, solitary Toledo towered so distinctly apart from the rest of the world that it seemed not even time could touch it.
MARK'S parents had brought him to the ancient capital to show him the wonders of the place and to tell him that they were going to get a di-vorce. It was at the end of their lunch, when Mark had assured them that he couldn't possibly eat anything more, not even another bollo de crema, that they finally broke the news. His mother was going to marry the jolly, rich Dutch architect whom they had met in London the pre-vious winter and had been running into here and there ever since — alone or in the company of his two snooty daughters, who were now to be-come Mark's stepsisters.
"But we're Catholics!" Mark objected, his voice breaking. "You have to stay married. We've got to ride the same donkey."
The actor gave no sign of remembering. "These things happen," he said, straightening his back against the back of his chair. "People get divorced every day."
Mark was offered the choice of going to live with his mother and her new family in their comfortable home in Amsterdam or staying on the road with his father. Both parents insisted that his happiness came first and they would go along with his decision whatever it might be — which only convinced him that neither of them wanted him. Back in his hotel room in Madrid the next day, succumbing to terror and panic, he tore up all his handkerchiefs — the only things he could destroy undetected and not keep hearing about it — and such secret rages would recur for months. But in Toledo he refused to give his parents the satisfaction of showing that he was affected by the blow. "Well, at least I won't have to listen to you two fighting all the time," he told them. "It's a relief"
Indeed, only moments later his mother started to argue that he should 26
have been told sooner, before they came to Spain, and then the couple went off to quarrel in private.
Left by himself on the terrace, with the river far below and Toledo straight ahead of him in the sky, floating in the haze of the August after-noon heat, Mark wondered about all the times during the past year when his mother had gone sight-seeing on her own, telling him that he should stay home and study. She had lied to him. She loved a stranger more than she loved him. Jealousy made him experience the keenest sense of abandonment: he would never again daydream of imaginary parents. What was the use of rosy fantasies?
He took his presents from his mother's basket to see what he had, and after flipping through the empty pages of his leather-bound diary, searched the basket for a pen. Having found one, he started to write the story of his life, so that people would know what he had been through — but he wrote only a few sentences before deciding that nobody would be inter-ested in his troubles. Then he picked up the old book his father had bought him and, wiping his eyes, read a paragraph here and there until he came upon the story of Captain Parry's ship, the Flora.
"Riquezas envueltas en horror y misterio," wrote Menendez, giving a three-page account of the gold crowns and ingots, replicas of the Ma-donna of Lima and jeweled crosses, and noting that this floating treasure house was presumed to have gone down in the great hurricane of 182o, somewhere in the northwestern Bahamas. Racing through the chapter, Mark immediately knew that the Flora was his ship. (It was not until the next day that he started to worry about the possibility that someone might have found the wreck since Menendez's book was published in 1908.) In his desolate mood, what enthralled him was not so much the description of the cargo as the revolting murders committed for it; they vouched for its value and made the treasures as real as if he had touched them.
`That's how it is, that's life,' he reflected, deciding to take diving les-sons. 'People are monsters and I'd better get rich or I'll have to depend on monsters. I have to stop wasting my time.'
Having forsworn wishful thinking once and for all, Mark began to daydream about finding the bountiful wreck — distracted somewhat by the miraculous view of Toledo, suspended between heaven and the parched earth with its churches, monasteries and fortresses, pale gray, umber and gold in the shimmering haze.
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