The Master of the Prado by Javier Sierra

Author:Javier Sierra
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Atria Books

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CHARLES AND THE LANCE OF CHRIST

To believe?

Perhaps Santi’s advantage was his certainty. Perhaps reason wasn’t enough to really understand a work like The Glory—maybe you also needed the certainty of faith to uncover its full meaning.

What if I were to take that risk? What if I were to decide to believe?

It was then, in those first days of 1991, that I came to the conclusion that in life, you had to give yourself over to providence, and it was also then that I decided to live by this idea and to take it to its ultimate conclusions.

I wanted to believe that the master class I’d received from Santi Jiménez—so opportune and at just the right moment—had not been mere coincidence, but rather the most recent step of a plan that had begun the day I first encountered my Master of the Prado. And, as ridiculous as it might sound, I believed that this plan was designed to steer me to the secrets behind certain paintings in the Prado.

What if I were just to give myself over to this plan and let it carry me along? What would be so wrong in following the signs I’d received from so many different and unexpected people, not just in Madrid but also in Turégano and at El Escorial? And if I did let this plan lead me, where would I end up?

With all this pressing on my mind, I found myself standing in front of The Glory not twelve hours later.

It was true that everything so far had led me here, to this painting. From the mysterious Mister X, with his article on Charles V and the key to the painting, to Marina mediating, and even to Santi himself. At the same time, I couldn’t help turning over in my mind the story of how the most powerful man in the world had surrendered his soul to God.

After our conversation, Santi had lent me two fat biographies of Charles V so that I could get an idea of what the emperor’s last transit had been like. From these I learned that it was at about two in the morning on the September 21, 1558—St. Matthew’s Day—in a little stone house attached to a convent about a mile outside the tiny village of Cuacos in a region of Cáceres known as La Vera, that the great Spanish caesar took his last breath.

This gaunt and restless man had had plenty of time to put all the affairs of state in order, but nonetheless had not dealt with his own last few possessions. The painting that had so occupied him, his library, his collection of clocks and astrolabes—even the chair that had been specially built to prop up his gout-ridden leg—these were all left forgotten at Yuste.

The Glory lay there, dormant, until at last Charles’s son Philip II had it brought back to El Escorial along with his father’s preserved remains. It was by this accident of history that both the mummified emperor and

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